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Forums 1C:Maddox Games IL2 Maddox General Discussion Osprey: Ki-43 Oscar had 50% of all Japanese fighter kills.|
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LOL, most pilots back then were not technical manual writers either! What did Sakai mean after the war when he stated "large numbers"? Did -he- even state that or was it a translation? What accuracy did his comments have about a change in tactics by the P-38 units overall making a reversal in Japanese pilot's view of this plane? Just what losses did the P-38 units, all of them total take in the Solomons month by month? Was there or was there not a change in tactics as described? If you can't find USAAC quotes on the matter that doesn't mean it never happened.
First of all you should note that he wrote . That really changes the perspective, doesn't it? That post isn't the only one at that archive where training and tactics are addressed. If you follow the links then you will find much but not exactly the same being said by the guys who were there from the start. The AVG pilots were schooled in tactics completely different from what was being taught when they shipped out to join the AVG. The man who taught them the new tactics was pushed out of the US for trying to bring about change in the tactics being taught. It's a good thing that Thach was able to devise and teach something more effective than dogfighting. Consider that the same tactic was used by the AVG in their first combat as part of a larger system they had been trained in -months- before Dec 1941 when they entered combat for the first time and kicked @$$ from the start due to the same training and tactics. BTW the same links do address issues of claims and confirmations. You can check before you give generalized answers and save me from dragging out more quotes. AVG History:
Eric Schilling answering the same question:
Is he saying that everything that all US pilots did was wrong? Or is he talking more about averages leading to early losses and the changes that came about? Consider that he had combat experience on top of being trained earlier in tactics that the US forces only fully adopted later and views the history through that experience. The AVG was disbanded in July 1942 after less than 8 months of operations and already they were elite pilots.
I am sure of that. Very seriously. Yeager and a number of others write about such drills and the mock combats in their own training periods and then if you read what they had to say going operational: the real training started with combat. Can you dispute the reason for the SHORT average lifespan in sorties of the average US rookie fighter pilot in theaters when and where the enemy hadn't been subdued with the kill scores of the talented survivors?? Why do I think you will try? I will repeat what I put at the top of that post and still hold that it does apply regardless of nitpicking details:
And yet:
So he didn't get his information from The Psychic Friends Network, how come the rest had no clue?
Hard to say that it's not just poor use of language, that (1) through 1942 the AAF boys were outnumbered and that (2) the Ki-43's swarming over them didn't happen from the start. It wouldn't be the first time. OTOH someone might have misremembered what year or plane the impression came from. Since as I posted I don't know the identity of the writer perhaps the accuracy of what he wrote can be gaged from an unambiguous line he wrote in there:
And here is his web pages -- FWIW check out the awards, just don't take it as some kind of endorsement from me. That's why I posted I don't know who, etc. When people take a plane out to see what it can do they really find what they can do with it. |
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Consider the context for a moment. Schilling was quoting Sakai’s biography, so he doesn’t have first or even really second hand information. My point was that Sakai wasn’t there, and his only source of information at the time was rumor and propaganda. Most of his fellow combat pilots in the theater didn’t come back to Japan until a couple of years later (if at all), so their version of events (assuming that they did talk to their old pal back in Japan) might not have been clear in terms of the timeline. As I’ve said repeatedly, the old veterans rarely pay attention to new information on something they already “know” unless they are still active military and the new information has a direct relationship to their job. No. Among the pilots trained in the prewar period, when the so-called poor training regimen you talk about are numbered a large percentage of wartime aces and leaders of some distinction. Zemke, Lynch, Wagner, and Gabreski for just a few. My reading on the period tells me that the majority of popular theories involving fighter tactics during that time were wrong, and that the Army Air Corps in the US were heavily swayed by the bomber theorists; in retrospect, the lack of a coherent 'book' on tactics probably freed the US fighter community to write their own doctrines on the basis of observed facts rather than try to fit the facts into the framework of a flawed doctrine. This meant that they actually became more effective sooner than they might have if they had used something like the RAF's prewar doctrines (think about how many RAF squadrons were still using vics in 1943...). As I recall, Schilling was former Navy; a lot of AVG guys were, and the Navy also trained pilots at the squadron level, because in the 1930s, a pilot was a pilot; a good many of the AVG's ex squids were dive bomber or torpedo pilots who wanted to fly fighters instead. Some of them might have not been too grateful for the training they did receive. I'm not denigrating Chennault's preparation by any means, because he was very much a visionary in his field, BUT he would not have been able to provide that specific preparation for Japanese capabilities and tactics if he had not spent over a year seeing the Japanese in action for himself. He was a classic case of the right man in the right place at the right time. My response is the same as I had posted earlier; tactics are dependent upon intelligence about what your opponent can or can’t do compared to your own aircraft. That really has nothing to do with how well you can fly your aircraft or shoot your guns, unless you are a virtuoso who can squeeze 101% out of his aircraft 200% of the time. US pilots at the outset of the war didn’t have a lot of useful information on Japanese fighter capabilities. Period. The Japanese, on the other hand, had a pretty good ‘book’ on Allied fighters that they were likely to encounter. That was a HUGE edge; it was enhanced by combat experience and the fact that the Japanese were throwing the first punch. The P-40 was considered a pretty maneuverable fighter in 1941—comparable in the horizontal to the Spit V, and better in the dive and zoom at medium alts—and in the absence of solid information about the other guys’ capabilities, most pilots will play to what they consider their aircraft’s strengths. The same pilots who were easy meat for Zeros or Nates in 1942 probably could have acquitted themselves much better against Bf 109s or MC 202s, whose capabilities and relative strengths they were much more aware of. The reason for short average lifespans of first timers in combat is simple: most of the time, you are going up against someone who has already survived one or more combats, and he no longer has the ‘civilized’ inhibition against pulling the trigger. This has been true of almost every combat unit entering the fire for the first time; he who hesitates is lost, and hopefully his buddies figure it out after the object lesson of seeing their buddies turned into rapidly cooling pieces of meat. Those who don’t hesitate, or live long enough to learn not to, are far better equipped to survive their next combat. Thach saw one intelligence report (out of many) in the fall of 1941 and took it seriously, while most of his peers in the American/Allied fighter community did not. Thach was well connected in a lot of ways though, and he may have gotten some extra inside information that led him to put credence in this report and ignore others that may have contradicted it. There’s also the fact that Thach’s squadron was shore based at the time, and he had more leisure time than the average commander of a squadron actually assigned to a carrier (not to mention better lines of communication) which would allow him more time for that sort of thing. We (here in this forum) don’t know how detailed the Navy intelligence bulletin was, its rated urgency or its source(s). We have no idea if the Army Air Force issued a similar intelligence bulletin or if the senior officers in MacArthur’s command gave it any credence or passed it on to their group or squadron commanders with an endorsement, and we don’t know how many other bulletins contradicting that bulletin were issued in the six months leading up to the Japanese surprise attacks around the Pacific rim. I detailed in an earlier post how hard it was to communicate across the world in 1940-41; when you add in the bureaucratic process, filtering what was and what wasn’t valid or useful information out of reams of other potentially useful bits of data was unbelievably hard. The amazing thing is that someone as capable as Thach latched on to that bit of information and began planning accordingly, not that almost everyone else ignored it or failed to take it seriously. The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of Allied pilots (including the Commonwealth pilots—many of whom had combat experience against the Germans—protecting Rangoon right beside the AVG) had no clue of how capable Japanese fighters were. I’m sure that it’s a nice website, and the articles look interesting, but I lean heavily towards published books and magazine articles that everyone here can reference and have to meet a certain amount of review. I think that here we’re dealing with a legend that fits into a certain type of narrative. These generalized quotes remind me all too much of the Luftwhiners who imply (and apparently believe with all their hearts) that the Mustang was delivered to the 8th Air Force in late 1943 in its fully evolved form and replaced all 15 fighter groups’ P-47s in one day while ninjas crept onto every jagdewaffe facility in Europe and cut the throats of all pilots with more than 200 hours of flight time in their logbooks just so that thousands of well trained American pilots flying their overloaded Mustangs could descend upon poor German high school boys who could barely fly their technically superior Doras and Kurfursts and (unfairly) butcher them with impunity. My sources tell me that the numbers of Japanese aircraft in most of the Pacific and the CBI barely matched the numbers of Allied aircraft mustered to oppose them in 1941-42, but that the Allies were scattered, poorly prepared, poorly supplied, poorly coordinated and that their aircraft generally lacked the range to cover the territory they were supposed to be protecting. They were playing catchup while the Japanese had a central command structure, a clear plan of action, shorter supply lines, longer ranged aircraft (which is a kind of force multiplier) and the initiative. Once the Allies firmed up their command structure, established their supply lines and built up a clear picture of what the Japanese aircraft could and couldn’t do, the tide turned. They still had to have more aircraft to cover more territory, and it was still a hard year of fighting before they were able to whittle down the experienced core of prewar trained Japanese combat pilots, but once the Allies took the initiative away from the Japanese, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. cheers horseback "Here's your new Mustangs, boys. You can learn to fly'em on the way to the target. Cheers!" -LTCOL Don Blakeslee, 4th FG CO, February 27th, 1944 |
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The upstairs brass is always ready to win the last war and don't like anything else. Look what they did to Mitchell!
His tactics were not doctrine or regular training back in the States prior to 1942. And what some US Aces accomplished *during* the war does not change training and practices prior to 1941.
So just when was Shilling a Navy pilot? Or was that just for the purpose of claiming he didn't know Army training? You've just gone from the Allied pilots didn't have a current set of aircraft silhouettes of Japanese aircraft, much less a clue about what they could do. to hedging over global communications in one post. Intelligence was having no big problem intercepting, decoding Japanese naval communications and getting the intelligence out not just to the CINCPAC equivalent but back to Washington DC. It wasn't like today but it wasn't smoke signals and jungle drums either. I won't bother to debate with you any more on the matter. I don't even know what change to suit world you live in. When people take a plane out to see what it can do they really find what they can do with it. |
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Okay, my bad. Schilling was not one of several former USN trained pilots who signed with the AVG like Boyington, Howard and others. I wrote my response from work, away from my references.
THAT was wrong. Beat me up all you want about that. This is RIGHT: The intelligence/communications issue is a big one. I'm not hedging over anything. The war warning to the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii on the early morning of Dec 7th 1941 was delivered (during the attack) by Western Union telegram, because they couldn't get through from Washington by military radio. Intelligence had HUGE problems decoding Japanese radio communications; they had a network of listening posts all over the world, and it took a lot of time to deliver those messages to the experts in Washington, decode & interpret the messages, decide what they actually meant, rate their importance, and decide who got to know what bits of information. There was also the matter of deciding whether to share that information with the other branches of the military... That was not a process of a day or so, it often took weeks for a complicated message to make its way through the system and out to the various major Air Force Commands, where yet another layer of intelligence officers would pass judgement about what was or wasn't relevent or valid. An important message, if recognized as such, might be sped along its way a bit faster, but it still had to be relayed halfway across the world on more occasions than not. I spent three years on a frigate out of Pearl Harbor in the late seventies, and I worked in the elctronics maintenance department of my ship; it took a lot of effort to get secure comms through the radio even then, and we were just getting satellite communications on line. It was MUCH worse in 1941. The historical record confirms that most Allied pilots were clueless about Japanese aircraft recognition, and had even less idea about Japanese doctrines and tactics, despite Chennault's efforts to pass his insights along, down the Burma Road out to Rangoon and then probably to the Philippines, where the nearest major US military command was located before the war. Do a little research on the subject, and then be a man and tell everyone what you found out. cheers horseback "Here's your new Mustangs, boys. You can learn to fly'em on the way to the target. Cheers!" -LTCOL Don Blakeslee, 4th FG CO, February 27th, 1944 |
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Quote, Deepo_HP: "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."
-Who says that at 400 MPH is where the Oscar's max. roll rate is found? All the Corsair pilot is saying is that he was slightly out-rolled at 400 MPH, period. And I say that makes it unlikely to be a Zero. US Tests against a P-38 show good high speed handling on the Ki-43-I anyway, well past 300 MPH. A far cry from the A6M's test performance... "quote Deepo_HP: 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." -A poster on this forum mentionned it not very long ago, with some credible details to support this opinion. In the Osprey book, Ki-43 pilots also claim to be very impressed with the round's explosive effect... The Army going as far as to call it a "cannon"... OK, maybe not 100% of a real 20 mm, but probably more than 50%... From the blowing-up gun issues of the Ki-43-I, it was certainly a bit more than just a regular 12.7 mm round... "quote Deepo_HP: 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?" - I think it's obvious wing-mounted guns have to converge, and therefore cannot be aimed in the same way as cowl-mounted guns. Furthermore, just because two different caliber guns have the same muzzle velocity doesn't mean that they share a similar ballistic trajectory at all. Saburo Sakai complained bitterly about these disparities on the A6M2, and made no mention of the problem having been solved on the A6M5, though the issue might have been alleviated in terms of the poor reach of the previous A6M2's 20mm guns compared to the much higher velocity of the A6M5's 20 mm guns (720 m/s vs 500 m/s). The basic problem was superficially the same on the FW-190A, but in fact, if you look closely, you will see the FW-190A's inner 20 mm guns are ALSO synchronized because they are so close to the fuselage, and they are in fact ALSO fuselage guns... Add to this the fact that nobody had cause to complain about the hitting power of the 190A's 13mm cowl guns alone... Furthermore, and this was Saburo Sakai's biggest gripe about the armament, the 7.7 mm guns were near-useless, and had no place on a serious WWII fighter, yet, according to him, most of the Zero's fighter kills (at the very least most of the early ones) were gained SOLELY with the 7.7 mms, because the 20 mm wing guns compounded the convergence problem with a slow rate of fire of 320-350 rpm (something even the later higher-velocity A6M5 guns did nothing to improve on)... Saburo Sakai thus addressed this very issue in criticizing the Zero's armament: "In choosing the 20 mm round, the Navy focused on destructive power in the narrow sense, but they failed to take into consideration that rapidity of fire was necessary to hit a fleeting target" So as he said, a slow rate of fire, different ballistics, different convergence behaviour; it all complicates things that are already complicated enough by themselves... So the "useable" guns were near-useless, and the "good" guns were so slow-firing and so different in set-up, they were also near-unuseable against fighters... Between those two, I'd rather have a useable pair of 12.7 mms, even if the rate of fire was only 20% higher than the Zero's 20mm: At least I wouldn't have to deal with the distractions of the 7.7mms AND the convergence... Quote, Deepo_HP; "not to speak of the fairly higher amount of ammunition in any Zero..." -Higher amount of ammunition in the Zero? Of 7.7 mm ammo sure. Of the slow-firing 20 mm ammo: 250 rounds in the later A6M5 models, 200 in the early A6M5s. The Ki-43-II carried 500 rounds of 12.7 mm. Against fighters it clearly had much more firing time available, with useful armament, than all the Zeroes up to the A6M5b at least... Though it is true the rate of fire of the Browning mechanism did not take well to being synchronized, making the 800-900 rpm potential of the Ki-43's 12.7mm guns barely 400-450 rpm, a mere 20% above the A6M5's wing guns, they still had the advantage on an infinite zero-in with no convergence to worry about. Plus a significant number of later Ki-43s, the Ki-43-III, had two wing-mounted 12.7mm guns zipping along at the full Ho-103 unsynchronized 800-900 rpm, clearly crushing the density of fire of all but the last few production A6M5cs and A6M7s... The Zero's armament does look better, "on paper". In practice; not so great... Except for the very last 5-gun models, which FINALLY had an armament that really improved the Zero (and would have been MUCH better-still with a quartet of Army Ho-103 12.7 mms in the wings instead...). However, I would concede that IF the Ki-43-II has indeed had a much greater number of 1943-45 kills than the A6M5, the toughness of the F6F and F4U's radial P&W 2800s engines (compared to the liquid-cooled P-39s, P-40s, P-51 and P-38 engines) has likely more to do with it than anything else... Aside from that, it seems to me the A6M's armament tried to have it both ways, and ended up doing nothing well... Gaston |
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So they sent it by already-laid cable and it got through.
Decoded from Japanese codes long before reaching DC and again there was a -working- communications network in place.
Be a man? Look what it took to get you to admit not that you MADE UP what you needed to dispute part of a point but that your little dodge was in error. If you DID THE CHECKING, AKA_A_LITTLE_RESEARCH then you would have gotten it right but ---and get this part right--- what you did was to blow smoke (AKA_BS) instead. Quit inventing excuses and be a man yourself! All that Thach had to do was read what came over the wire LIKE ANYONE ELSE THERE. What he did that most others didn't was to THINK and APPLY INITIATIVE about it. NOT a matter of communications. You want to say about the combat applicable training US military pilots received prior to 1941 or even to 1942 then find out what the training actually was or was not instead of trying to point out wartime kills as proof of what you don't know. I dug up and keep digging up that it was not nearly as good as the ready-for-war training that already experienced Japanese and get this, RUSSIANS and GERMANS were getting at the time. As for the British, BoB survivors state time and time again about British Squadrons entering the BoB flying 3 plane formations and taking heavy losses until they changed tactics. And they say that when one squad rotated out they didn't tell the new guys coming in for whatever lack of reason (probably assumed someone else would) so the fresh guys without experience took their related losses and learned from that. THAT is the kind of counter-hindsight things that happened and why you can't turn results into a true picture of what happened. I know that doesn't fit in with your flag-waving US Uber Alles world-view but I could care less for your fantasy. People like you have been bad-will ambassadors for our nation since before WWII. I'm just glad the some of the rest of the world knows we're not all like that. Kill counts only prove kill counts. Consistent counts only indicate that a total of a large number of factors are working to some degree but change one thing and it could be different tomorrow. Military history bears that out regularly. When people take a plane out to see what it can do they really find what they can do with it. |
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There is a simple reason why Ki43 "Hayabusa" ("Falcon") was so well known in Japan even during the WWII; IJA proactively used 64th Squadron (commander Col. Katou) for propaganda, and even created a movie entitled "Katou Hayabusa Sentoutai" ("Katou Falcon Fighter Group") in 1944 after his combat death. You can find his photo, and a 1944 movie poster in this link, http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/加藤隼戦闘隊 You can even see a Youtube clip of the movie here, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS12isLjS5w The 64th had its moral boosting wing-man song, sang by actors in the movie, which was (and still is) widely known as a typical WWII military song in Japan, and you hear the song in the aforementioned movie clip. |
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I once explained about the issue long time ago on this board. IJA called its 12.7mm guns "Kikan-hou" (which would translate into "Cannon" in English) instead of "Kikan-jyu" ("machine-gun") ----- because IJA developed explosive ammo rounds for 12.7mm. IJN, on the other hand, didn't use explosive ammo for 12.7mm, and called only 20mm or greater "cannon". In IJN terminology, 12.7mm was "machine-gun" ("Kikan-jyu). When I read Japanese descriptions on IJA's 12.7mm "cannon" (written in Japanese), I get an impression that it was not as effective as IJN's real 20mm "cannon". IJN pilots ridiculed IJA pilots, basically saying "poor guys, they don't have real cannons, there is no chance to get B17." But of course some IJA pilots did shot down B24 etc. (I once saw an interview of IJA ace who explained how he downed B24 with Ki43 in Youtube.) Someone mentioned about the speed of Ki43. Comparison of speed between IJA and IJN is a tricky issue, because IJA's own specs were probably underrated. IJN developed better oil refinery techniques for its aircraft, but they kept it secret from IJA. Accordingly, IJA used inferior gas than IJN. If IJN shared their oil refinery technology with IJA, Ki43 could have flown somewhat faster.... I was astounded when I read about this in a Japanese publication some number of years ago. |
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Ok coming from the perspective of a total newbie... was this HE .50cal ammo ever used in Oscar HMG's?
Any details... as to, Ki-43 type, gun type, theater of use etc. anything. It sounds interesting. Thanks. ps. in game Ki-43 always seem to suit me better than A6M for some reason. |
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It was not a simple matter of going around the corner when the radio message couldn’t get through; it could not be phoned in and paid for with General Marshall’s debit card. No, someone had to get into a car and drive to a Western Union Office on a Sunday morning (would the office normally be open?—that part of the country still has some limits on what businesses can be open on the Sabbath) to send the message by an unsecure civilian telegraph. The war message was decoded and translated almost seven hours before the attack, but there was no secure means of sending the message to Kimmel and Short (the Navy & Army commanders in Hawaii) in time at all, and the civilian means took even more time they didn't have. There was only a single telegraph line to the islands back in 1941; the first phone cable from the mainland to Hawaii wasn't laid until 1957.
Actually, there weren’t a hell of a lot of people in the US (particularly in the military) who could speak fluent Japanese and weren’t of suspect loyalty (I’ll leave the discussion of whether that suspicion in the case of second and third generation Japanese-Americans was justified for another thread; the point is that persons of non-Asian descent were almost exclusively used as interpreters of those Japanese communications in 1941). Every interpreter involved in the program of decrypting and interpreting Japanese radio communications had a serious backlog. They were doing a hell of a job for the technology of 1941, but it was vastly more time consuming and complicated than we can imagine today.
First, let me say: Nice Rant. You’re the only male person I can picture reading angrily and taking offense where none was intended because you stop thinking once your sensibilities are offended. I ‘made up’ nothing; I made an error due to a faulty memory, and I qualified my statement at the time by saying “…as I recall,” to make it clear that I was working from memory, not a website or a book. A significant portion of the AVG’s pilots were former Navy and Marine aviators. I thought Schilling was one of them; I may have mentally lumped him in with that group due to the fact that like a number of the Navy pilots, he had been assigned to recon or patrol type aircraft in the service instead of the fighters he probably desired. You clearly have no idea how much classified paper got sent to a squadron commander over the course of a week in the tense period 6 months before Pearl Harbor, or how much military intelligence bulletins tend to overlap and/or contradict themselves or each other in a remarkably short period of time. The fact that Thach was ashore at the time is very important; he would have been too busy to spend much time contemplating the information otherwise. Most of his peers who were running units at sea either never saw, or did not have the time to digest that bulletin and seriously consider its implications and/or follow up on it, before initialing and filing it and moving on to the next piece of paper they were required to read before going about the parts of their jobs that they were judged on directly and immediately. During the pre-war period, an officer commanding a squadron at sea spent all his time keeping his squadron operational, teaching his junior pilots, making sure that his aircraft are properly maintained, overseeing the discipline and day to day affairs of his enlisted support personnel, writing reports and being a buffer between his command and the carrier’s officers as well as the other senior officers within the Air Group. By itself, that could run to an 18 to 20 hour a day job at sea. On top of that, Intelligence reports were not sent by radio to the ship; they were usually flown in or hand carried aboard when the ship made port. The length and detail of such documents made encryption and sending by radios of the time tedious and time consuming, so most secure messages had to be brief and sufficiently important to justify the extra time and effort involved. As I say, the wonder of the whole thing to me was that someone as capable and talented as Thach was able to catch it, take it seriously and prepare for it, not that everyone else missed it. In 1930s America, Japan was not noted for good engineering, quality HDTVs or the Toyota Prius; the idea that they were building world class naval fighters would have seemed far fetched to most people in the world at that time. But hey, you just keep grabbing that fig leaf and insisting that you and you alone are the sole Keeper of the Truth. I kinda like imagining your voice getting shriller and shriller until your head explodes. This apparently is one of those “…define what is is” arguments. Considering what the majority of American & western European aviation ‘experts’ and theorists believed at the time, my stance is that had the prewar trained US pilots been ‘trained’ to those doctrines and tactics, they would have been much worse off than they actually were by being treated as the Air Corps’ red-headed step children. Chennault was more or less run out of the Army because he tried too hard to develop and get officially recognized doctrines and tactics that didn’t cater to the bomber barons who were running the Air Corps. He could never have achieved what he did if he had stayed in the Army, even if he had not retired before the US entered the war, because he wouldn’t stay ‘underground’ about his theories the way his superiors (even the ones who agreed with him) preferred. He was persona non grata to such a high degree that when he was brought back into the Army as a general, they brought in a more trusted officer named Brett with one day’s seniority in rank over Chennault specifically to ride herd on him in the CBI for Stillwell. Now, I will point out here that a lot of the antifighter prejudice was due to the idea that no serious potential enemy could reach the United States with heavy bombers; we had pacified Canada by secretly subsidizing the production of Moosehead beer and the National Hockey League, and Mexico was well, Mexico. Who was going to send heavy bombers to wipe our industrial centers like Pittsburgh or Chicago off the map? Why would we need fighters anyway? How would the taxpaying public accept the expense? The fighter community in the prewar Army Air Corps was still composed of some pretty good professional officers, men like Hubert Zemke or Tom Lynch who could fly, lead, develop and teach fighter tactics and strategy. I wasn’t pointing out their victory totals but the fact that these guys developed good tactics on the fly, wrote clear & effective doctrine that reached the units throughout their theaters, and taught other good pilots and officers to lead and fight effectively. I believe that they were more successful than they might have been if the USAAC had adopted the RAF’s Fighter Command prewar doctrines, or something similar in the late 1930s. I don’t think the German, Soviet or Japanese training regimes would have been acceptable or possible for any number of reasons. My argument in this thread has always been that little or no training in strategy and tactics is better than extensive training in bad doctrine and tactics. Part of the reason that Germany, the USSR, and the Japanese had successful tactics and doctrine was due to the prewar testing of their theories and doctrines in Spain, Nomonhan and Manchuria. The other part was that they knew that their ultimate aims would require going to war, so their intelligence arms were very active in ensuring that their militaries had a clear idea of what their potential opponents had and what it could do. Even recognizing that such behavior was likely to be necessary, most of the western powers apparently felt that to do so was beneath them, as peace loving democracies. I doubt that I would have really wanted my country’s airmen trained in the same way that expansionist totalitarian countries like the ones you cite trained their pilots. All three made it obvious that the ultimate aim of their training was to go to war to achieve national objectives, not to prepare them to defend their own countries’ territory or legitimate interests. I doubt that you consider the routine brutality of the Japanese training methods or the political indoctrination that went with the Soviets’ training all that desirable, and I’m sure that you would have strenuously objected to spending the kind of funds necessary for that level of training had you been a US taxpayer at the time (i.e., still mired in the Great Depression). On top of that, peacetime Congresses tend to get their panties in a bunch (I’m sure you recognize that feeling) when the military is doing things they can spin as unnecessary or inappropriate. As for the Brits and what they did early in the war, I don’t recall applauding or approving it; I honestly believe that their counsel on fighter doctrine and tactics in 1942-3 was poorly suited to USAAF needs on many points. American leaders may have learned more from the RAF’s mistakes than they did from their successes. As I pointed out, a lot of RAF combat fighter squadrons were still flying in vics as late as 1943 because they made a poor effort at spreading the good news about successful tactics and doctrine. This must be the straw man part of your argument that you go off into the microsecond you see something or someone you disagree with. For the record, I have not been waving a flag, or dismissing any other country’s pilot training. I simply stated that I thought that it was unfair to blame the Japanese early war air combat successes against Army Air Corps pilots on ‘poor training’. I’m not a believer in blanket statements, and there were many more valid reasons for the Japanese successes than employing the image of American boys being sent out to some distant island barely able to take off and land, much less fight for their lives in the sky against a veteran opponent who is flying a splendid, combat proven, fighting machine. Getting half your fighters caught on the ground in the Philippines on the first day is not a matter of poor pilot training (that would be bad luck in this particular case). Not knowing what the Empire of Japan’s aircraft can do or often what they even looked like when no other ‘professional’ air force in the world was aware of their capabilities either was not a matter of poor pilot training (that would be bad intelligence on our part and good deception on theirs). Finding out the hard way that Japanese aircraft are significantly better at what you had always thought your fighter’s best quality was is not the result of bad pilot training (again, bad intel). Not being a combat veteran when your country has been at peace for 23 years is not the result of bad training (that would be the result of being the citizen of a relatively peaceful, isolated democracy). Of course, the Commonwealth air forces in Burma and Northern Australia had a number of veterans, and they had their problems with the Japanese as well. I suppose that was the result of poor American pilot training too, if one spins it correctly... Not adjusting instantly to the reality that your country is at war as of early this morning (or even this month) when you’re on the front line and have to be ready to kill or be killed is not the result of poor training (that would be being merely human). Not having an adequate supply line stretching halfway around the world is not the result of poor training (uh, see the bit about peaceful, isolated democracy and add poor planning). There's a difference between being poorly trained and being poorly prepared. The American Leadership, both military and civilian, were responsible for being prepared, and they screwed the pooch badly in that respect. Their timing was horribly off. Army Air Corps prewar pilot training was admittedly less good than the Navy and Marines' prewar pilot training, but I don't think it was substantially less good than that of any of our Allies. They had worse problems than whether they were taught a specific doctrine for fighting in high speed monoplanes with reliable radio voice communications barely a couple of years after the damned things were invented. cheers horseback "Here's your new Mustangs, boys. You can learn to fly'em on the way to the target. Cheers!" -LTCOL Don Blakeslee, 4th FG CO, February 27th, 1944 |
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The message did get through just as the information that reached Thach so there's no need to suppose it couldn't.
Even when solar activity makes daytime ionosphere bouncing unworkable it generally works at night. Since the issue is about information being available to Army officers MONTHS before the start of the war there is no need to suppose about instant communications difficulties. The word got through, Thach read it in September and the information was not for his eyes only or any kind of special secret weird BS to be supposed. When the guys who had the training and went on to further training and combat say the US was far behind, that's what it means. No need to take it anywhere from there.
Still off in your own little world I see....
So now the Russian Air Force were not professionals since they knew from experience and no professionals, etc, etc. I posted information and you disagreed and still do but then you seem to get all kinds of special info out of what was written. You just keep imagining whatever you want. You must be right and it's Erik Shilling and the others who are wrong even in their hindsight. THEY literally don't know how it was the way that you do.
What previous post of yours says that and when I look won't show being edited before the one you replied to here? I'm not going to waste time looking for it or playing any more of your silly games. When people take a plane out to see what it can do they really find what they can do with it. |
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Mix and match games again. Thach was the only one who caught that one bit of critical information and believed it rather than the reams and reams of bulletins and general opinion that the Japanese warplanes were all copies of Western designs (like the old canard about Hughes' racer being the basis fo the Zero). "A Naval Intelligence Bulletin" tells us nothing about what was in it, its source--and China might almost as well have been on the moon in those days--or how detailed it was about the new Japanese Naval fighter's capabilities, or how they might actually have compared to modern Western fighters not available to Chiang Kai Shek. As I said earlier, Japan was not known for being a hotbed of engineering expertise or design genius in the late 1930s on any level. It took a little more than the average amount of 'vision' to wonder if this wasn't some yokel caught overseas babbling about something beyond his ability to judge.
I'm still trying to figure out how these "guys who had the training and went on to further training and combat" got all this first hand knowledge about US prewar training and how it was lacking. All they had to judge by was the results of our first battles in the Pacific, and our early showing in England and N. Africa, and yet, Torch was a far greater feat of logistics than the Soviets ever dared at the height of their air and land power. Maybe not so bad for first steps... Now when we look at the VVS, we can see that they didn't exactly covere themselves with glory for the first several months of their war with the Germans. No, they were victims of a surprise attack before they expected the inevitable war with the Nazis was supposed to take place. Their aircraft didn't match up very well against the German types--but wait; these well trained pilots of Mother Russia must have already developed superior tactics and doctrine to allow them to crush the Germans right? Uuhhh, NO. The Germans will tell us that the Russians were beaten so easily because they were... wait for it POORLY TRAINED! That's the universal explanation: Golly, we just rolled over them like they were tenpins. They must have been poorly trained. It's not like we were ready for it and they weren't, I mean, they must have known that we were going to sucker punch them last night at 3:02 AM and bomb most of their aircraft on the ground, and badly outnumber the ones who got into the air and clobber them without too much problem...Jesus, I'll bet none of them would have gotten halfway through OUR Basic without washing out, right? Special info? I've read The First Team, Wings of Gold, and Shattered Sword, not to mention Barret Tillman's excellent books on the Corsair, Wildcat and Hellcat several times, plus six years in the Navy as an Electronics Technician (E-6 selectee when I left in '81 after three years at sea & two years herding Ensigns at Surface Warfare Officers' School at NAB Coronado) which supplied a great deal of insight for my comments about a squadron commander's workload (I still work with COMSEC gear occasionally in my current job) and I actually have some life experience with old warriors--my father and all four of my uncles are combat vets in either WWII or Vietnam. Bergurud's Fire In the Sky and Molesworth's Osprey books on the 27th FG, Pacific P-40 Aces, and P-40 vs the Ki-43 were also sources for my statements, besides Gabreski's autobiography, Zemke's war memoir, and a round half dozen books about the P-38, which clued me in to Tom Lynch's contributions. I mentioned Barbara Tuchman's terrific biography of Vinegar Joe Stillwell, Toland's Rising Sun, and a few others in earlier posts. Do I need to add a bibliography to each post with little superscript numbers so you can check each source? Funny how your responses keep getting shorter when my answers finally penetrate your eternal outrage. First page, my first post in this thread:
Is that not clear enough for you? cheers horseback "Here's your new Mustangs, boys. You can learn to fly'em on the way to the target. Cheers!" -LTCOL Don Blakeslee, 4th FG CO, February 27th, 1944 |
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The explosive ammo was developped by the Army obviously in an attempt to boost the destructive power of the too-small round; wether or not it was successful is still unknown, but the troubles they had losing entire airframes to ONE 12.7 mm explosive round, exploding NEAR the Ki-43-I's cowling, is indicative that it was not harmless...
In any case, noteworthy is the complete success of the Army's Browning design adaptations, which both in 12.7mm AND 20 mm were far superior in rate of fire (unsynchronized) to the put-putting Oerlikons 20mms from the Imperial Navy... Quote: "Someone mentioned about the speed of Ki43. Comparison of speed between IJA and IJN is a tricky issue, because IJA's own specs were probably underrated. IJN developed better oil refinery techniques for its aircraft, but they kept it secret from IJA. Accordingly, IJA used inferior gas than IJN. If IJN shared their oil refinery technology with IJA, Ki43 could have flown somewhat faster.... I was astounded when I read about this in a Japanese publication some number of years ago." -Somehow I have doubts this was a major issue to actual IJA mid or late war speed performance, but maybe later in the war there was more cooperation? The Ki-44 is quoted in most publications at 605 km/h, yet one WARTIME Tokyo area Japanese defense evaluation report pegs it at 650km/h, much more in line with what I assume is the "true" WEP speed... The same undoubtedly applies to the A6M5 Zero, whose 560 km/h were probably closer to 585-590 km/h if early Corsair pilot accounts are to be believed; "Our F4U was SLIGHTLY faster" The Ki-84 Frank was by far the fastest Japanese fighter of the war, and all its wartime pilots interrogated by US evaluators, answering the questions in a manner that was judged as "reliable", said roughly the same thing: The Ki-84's top speed was around 690-700 km/h, not the absurdly low "official" 625 km/h. Only the Ki-61 seems to stick to lower figures in the TAIC "calculated" figures, AND in the Tokyo area Japanese defense evaluation report... It is as if the TAIC data was based on actual flight tests at WEP, but that might be because the TAIC's later KAI-Tei(d) was 600 lbs overweight compared to the earlier short-nose Ki-61s, and drastically underperforming even by Japanese standards compared to these earlier Kai-Koh(a), Otsu(b), Hei(c)models... Probably the short-nosed Ki-61s did a bit better than 600 km/h at actual WEP, but the Tokyo area evaluation report must have taken into account the earlier short-nosed Ki-61s actually used (though if they wrongly assumed that mainly the underperforming later Kai-tei(d) aircrafts were used, that could explain it too...), and this Japanese report states a lowly top speed of 590 km/h... If that 590 km/h for a short-nose Ki-61 WEP top speed is true, then the Ki-61 may really have been little better than the Ki-43-II Oscar that likely did 560 km/h... The later 600 lbs heavier longer-nosed Ki-61 has been quoted as low as 570 km/h (and was very often used for part scavenging or Kamikaze attacks: HALF of the 2400 Ki-61 production...). The biggest issue with Japanese top speeds is not the oil used, but that the Japanese never made charts for what we in the West understand as true "War Emergency Power"; all charts were set at what we consider "Military Power", but labeled as "top speed". The top speed of 650 km/h, quoted for the Ki-44 by an actual wartime Japanese evaluation document, shows the deprivation of high-performance oils "secrets" could not have been a factor... It is a higher speed than ANY Navy aircraft of similar power, and, for once, a bit above what the horsepower figure would lead you to expect... Again, it is common sense that an aircraft like the Ki-84 or the N1K1, both with the same 1850 hp engine, cannot lumber around at a respective top speed of 625 km/h or 595 km/h... True top speed was of course at least 690 km/h for the former and around 650 km/h for the latter. The J2M3 "Jack" was also around 650 km/h with 1800 hp. The generally better speed of the Ki-44 and Ki-84 shows that, if anything, the Army had a leg up on technology! The Ki-43-II Oscar was similarly probably around 560-570 km/h, NOT the usually quoted figure of 530 km/h... In any case the notion that inferior oil limited the Ki-84 to 625 km/h, while the Navy "outperformed" the Army with the same-engine N1K1 at 595 km/h, seems to defy logic... Those "official" Japanese speed figures are at "Military Power", not true "War Emergency Power". And Il-2's Ki-84 reflects this if I remember the figures correctly... Gaston |
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I'll assume you mean the N1K1-J or N1K2, as the straight N1K1 was a floatplane. The difference in performance may reflect the fact that the N1K1-J/2-J was anywhere from 650-900 lbs heavier at loaded weight, and had a wing area that was about 10% larger than the Ki-84s. The Ki-84 also had a critical alt about 2,000 feet higher, due to different supercharging arrangements. The same Mk of Spitfire fitted engines with different critical alts could be anywhere up to 20-25 kph faster, with basically the same horsepower. ImpStarDuece, Flying Bullet Magnet... Catching Lead Since 2002 "There's no such thing as gravity, the earth sucks!" "Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism." -Carl Jung |
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No, I'm just not interested in your little game and refuse to play. That's not outrage much as you want to characterize it so. It's "why bother with this git?".
Which I pointed out that the US Army had enough such knowledge for Thach to see the report and take action. Now that's come around TWICE perhaps you can stop somewhere and get yourself a map.
Obviously it isn't clear enough for YOU! If you can't figure out that what you wrote validates what Shilling and the others said it isn't =my= fault. Thach did manage to train at first a few men well enough to keep them from being slaughtered outright and that did get passed on otherwise what would have happened at Midway where the Beam Defense made a great difference? When was that done? September 1941 right up to the battle, changing the OLD WAYS noted but still not completely what was needed as noted. And he did so on the basis of that information that the Allied air forces had NO knowledge about. Gee, if no professional Air Force had such knowledge then that means the organization that Thach belonged to... well at least if I accept your rhetoric then the USAAC were not professionals. And on that count no one should wonder why I don't care to play your silly game. horseback->left click->Add horseback to my Ignore list->left click When people take a plane out to see what it can do they really find what they can do with it. |
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They were given and copied Italian explosive bullets though I can't say if there were no changes. They really liked the Italian ammunition though. The Tripartite members all shared information to some degree. |
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He says he's put me on ignore, but let's put things back intehir logical order, and see what happens...
The Army? John Thach was a NAVY officer; the Navy and the Army had separate (very separate) intelligence systems. Have you never heard the expression ‘interservice rivalry’ before? It was not quite on the suicidal levels that the Japanese Army and Navy maintained, but the US Army and the US Navy did not willingly share resources. They don’t today, and things are much better than they were in the prewar and early war years. It is a mistake to assume that if the Navy had a bit of information, the Army did too, or that the Army’s intelligence and command structure would have endorsed or disseminated information that the Navy accepted, OR THAT ARMY AND NAVY OFFICERS WOULD SHARE THAT CLASSIFIED INFORMATION INFORMALLY (you can go to prison for stuff like that). As I said, the bulletin you keep citing was one of probably dozens of Classified documents crossing a senior Navy officer’s desk in the course of a week. Since there were and still are very strict rules for the handling of Confidential (and an Intelligence Bulletin would definitely be considered at least Confidential) documents, a lot of guys would be more concerned with skimming over its contents, initialing the stamp or attached sheet of paper indicating that this or that officer required to had seen the document, and getting it back in the safe or back in the hands of the yeoman tasked with carrying it to the XO or the next squadron CO or Department Head who had to see it and initial it. Again, I don’t know how much information was in this now-legendary-bordering-on-mythic Navy Intelligence Bulletin was, its source, or how much weight Naval Intelligence and BuAir gave it, or how much information was also passed along in other reports that would have contradicted it or confirmed it. The fact that one relatively lowly squadron CO took it seriously when the senior officers who were responsible for approving what was put on those Intelligence Bulletins did NOT take some kind of action tells a lot. A lot of ‘intelligence’ is based on rumor, and eventually turns out to be false. This is not like a satellite photo or someone smuggling out photos or videotape and a pilot handbook for it. I do know that the common impression at the time (not unlike the general opinion of their commercial products in the 1950s and early ‘60s, when I was growing up) was that the Japanese made poor quality, flimsy junk. That alone would cause many officers to discount a report about a greatly improved Japanese fighter that was faster and better than many Western designs.
Well, first, you question whether I actually was saying what I said, then when I do demonstrate that you missed my point entirely, you split the quotes and pretend that Thach was in the Army and that the point of contention is whether EVERYONE had access to one little bit of information he noticed that turned out to be horribly true. Thach was one of less than 10 (if I recall correctly) Navy fighter squadron commanders in late 1941; in an Air Group, he would be subordinate to the CAG (usually a Lieutenant Commander then -- equivalent to an Army Major), and the CAG would be subordinate to an officer about the rank of Captain (equivalent to the Army rank of Colonel) in the Naval Aviation organization and/or the Captain of his carrier and/or the Admiral commanding the Carrier’s Task Force. ALL of the officers above him, as well as the other fighter squadron commanders in the Navy and Marine Corps, and their superiors in the chain of command would probably have had a copy of your All Revealing Naval Intelligence Bulletin cross their desks. IF the Bulletin were as fully detailed and authenticated as coming from a reliable and knowledgeable source as you seem to imagine, and IF there were no other information that might contradict it as you apparently assume, why was Thach the only one who took it seriously, or at least as used it as a pretext to do a little experimenting with formations and tactics that had not been available before the monoplane fighter with enclosed cockpits and reliable voice radio communications had been introduced (which is to say from the standpoint of the USN), some time in the last 18-24 months? Why didn’t one of his peers or superiors latch onto it too? If it were common knowledge among the Allies, why weren’t the Commonwealth and Dutch East Indies air forces giving it serious thought or consideration? Why weren’t the Army Air Corps in the Far East aware of it? If they were aware, don’t you think that Allied pilots would have been more cautious when they first engaged these Japanese fighters, and tried something other than a classic dogfight if they had a choice? And let’s point out here (again) that a lot of them didn’t have a choice, getting caught on the ground, or grossly outnumbered their comrades were caught on the ground. You made a big deal about ME making things up or building large assumptions on tiny facts and went silent when I cited the sources and life experience that allowed me to come to my conclusions; this one Intelligence Bulletin, most likely a single sheet of single spaced typewritten paper, is a mighty small piece of 'fact' to build your assumption that EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THAT THE JAPANESE HAD BUILT FAST, HIGHLY MANUEVERABLE MODERN FIGHTERS AND PLANNED ACCORDINGLY. Should they also have known about the Zero's (and to a lesser extent, the Oscar's) unprecedented range capability? Knowledge of the enemy’s capabilities is NOT a function of training; it is a function of Military Intelligence (insert joke about oxymorons here). Knowing the enemy’s capabilities then dictates which tactics you would choose, and how you would attack or defend. We have seen NO evidence that the Army Air Corps in the Far East had any information about the Japanese military aircraft or what they could do; it wasn’t like it is today, when we have several thousand American servicemen stationed in Japan and Okinawa, with units shuttling in and out all the time. Japan was a fairly closed society to Westerners back then, and they weren’t exactly open about their new fighters (or much else) the way western powers were, even the ones at war. Finally, I weary of the ‘the Russians (and the British, and the French, and the Danes, and the Norwegians…ad nauseum) were surprised and unlucky, but the Americans were poorly trained’ argument. They were quite aware of the Germans’ plans, their ground and air power (for Pete’s sake, some of them were contemplating the purchase of He-111s and Messerschmitts before they were invaded); it was hardly kept secret. Yet, they all got surprised and swamped. The Germans consistantly achieved tactical surprise during their conquest of western Europe, and only the sheer size of Russia finally slowed them down. Contrast that with what was known about the conflicts in China in the late 1930s (and some of the obviously impractical and unlikely 'pilot's anecdotes' we still get in accounts about the tussle with the Soviets over Nomonhan), or how pathetic the Chinese ground and air forces were at the time, and how easily the Japanese were slapping them around. And of course, in 1938-41, Northern China might as well have been on the backside of the moon & about as important, if you lived in the Americas or Europe. It's not as though all the world powers all had qualified observers there taking notes and photos, or that the Japanese were sending newsreel footage of their latest and greatest aircraft, with all their technical specifications. The Japanese were quite capable of concealing or obscuring that sort of information, and they were culturally predisposed to do so. It turned out to be quite beneficial to them in the short term, when they threw one of the greatest surprise parties of all time for American and Allied forces in the Pacific. cheers horseback "Here's your new Mustangs, boys. You can learn to fly'em on the way to the target. Cheers!" -LTCOL Don Blakeslee, 4th FG CO, February 27th, 1944 |
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Here is what I found in "The Maru Mechanic" vol.45 (1984), page 27, about the 12.7mm used for Ki43. I translate what the author (Mr. Yoshiro Yodo) stated:
"Early models of Ki43 used a "Type i" [i.e. Type-italian] 12.7mm cannon made in Italy to enhance the firepower of 7.7mm. However, the explosive ammo [imported from Italy] often jammed Type i during flight. Japanese explosive 12.7mm ammo (made in Japan) didn't jam Type i cannon, but there was a risk of explosion inside the gun. Accordingly, accidents often happened, resulting in the loss of the aircraft. The risk of explosion during the flight was considered better than not being able to shoot at all [Italian ammo], hence they used Japanese ammo instead. Later on, once they replaced Type-i with Ho-103 12.7mm cannons manufactured in Japan in combination with Japanese explosive ammo, the explosion accidents no longer took place." So, it seems that (1) Italian cannon with Italian explosive ammo had no risk of explosion, but it often jammed, hence became useless during the combat. (2) Italian cannon with Japanese explosive ammo didn't jam, but there was a risk of explosion. They chose to take the risk. (I guess the failure rate of Italian combo was too high). (3) Japanese Ho-103 with Japanese explosive ammo worked well. This message has been edited. Last edited by: J_Anonymous, |
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I think you are right about max speed not including WEP in Japanese reports but the comment about different oil.. I think he is referring to refining procedures- that is Octane! Tons of debates on this forum about octane and comppresion ratios No? BTW The IJA & IJN did not cooperate. It was unbelievably stupid and certainly not patriotic, but they treated each other as enemies. One reason Japan lost the war. |
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Thanks for clarifying it on my behalf Saburo_0, yes, I was of course talking about the difference of the OCTANE value of FEUL rather than "engine oil". IJA fuel had inherently lower Octane than IJN's because of the inferior oil refinery method IJA's contractors used. I even read about moaning made by an ex-IJA pilot concerning this issue somewhere; he stated that engine sound of Ki43 was different from A6's because of the poorer grade fuel used by IJA. He also stated that Ki43 could not fly as fast as A6M2 due to the poorer fuel even though the power-train was essentially the same between the two aircraft, and they were envious for Zero pilots. I don't know if "even though the power-train was essentially the same between the two aircraft" is true, but this clearly shows that IJA pilots (or at least some of them) attributed the lessor performance of Ki43 to the quality of fuel. After all, one needs to pump 93 octane gasoline to BMW, otherwise the car does not perform at the highest level. The same for Ki43. |
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Forums 1C:Maddox Games IL2 Maddox General Discussion Osprey: Ki-43 Oscar had 50% of all Japanese fighter kills.
