Japan's Kamikaze Fighter: The Mitsubushi Zero | War Factories | Timeline

my name's dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video the untold story of war production all wars are about competition production the side that can produce more is always going to triumph this is a war between the factories the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories [Music] they swamped the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world volkswagen fiat mitsubishi they're all household names now but they made those names as wall factories gotta get back to work [Music] sunday the 7th of december 1941 353 japanese aircraft sweep low over the hawaiian island of oahu and attack the u.s naval base at pearl harbor pearl harbor is infamous it's of course that great defining act that drags the united states into the second world war spearheading the assault is a revolutionary new kind of fighter the a6m 0. [Music] the japanese in 1941 have what is without a doubt the world's finest fighter airplane in the form of the a6 mitsubishi zero the mitsubishi zero was the key japanese naval air force fighter of world war ii it was what protected the japanese dive bombers the japanese torpedo bombers in that infamous attack on the 7th of december 1941 the americans were so surprised by the zero that at first they didn't think that it was a japanese aircraft they couldn't believe that the japanese could produce something of such intense quality manufactured by mitsubishi the story of the zero would mirror the story of japan's fortunes before during and after world war ii it is a story of triumph against the odds of innovation dragged down by reality and of military inventiveness transformed into peacetime genius but it is also a story about factories how factories or the lack of them would win and lose a war [Music] at pearl harbor 352 american planes were damaged or destroyed most of them on the ground by comparison only two japanese zeroes were shot down by american aircraft the first zero that shot down is actually a mistake you've got lieutenant philip rasmussen test firing the guns of his plane after takeoff opens the gun site boom zero flies in front of him and takes the full force of these guns [Music] now that's the first ever zero to be shot down by an american pilot and it was a complete fluke labelled the a6m by the japanese the zero was made by the mitsubishi corporation and before the war mitsubishi had a hand in all aspects of japanese society japanese corporate societies are organized in a very different way to any other capitalist economy there are two aspects to this the first is the existence of large networks of firms in the pre-war period these are the famous zaibatsu zaibatsu's are basically the corporations that do everything this means you have a kind of coordination between banks manufacturing suppliers retailers that you don't find in other economies and they work very closely with the japanese government this reflects a kind of social cohesiveness and if you like collectivism that you don't find in other capitalist economies it's a very distinctively japanese phenomenon so if you're the japanese army in the navy or indeed the japanese government zaibatsu are useful but also to be watched during the 1920s mitsubishi was one of four massive zaibatsu that dominated japanese society but their dominance was about to be challenged you've got this situation during the 1920s and 1930s that japan was to all intents and purposes taken over by this war-mongering clique of the japanese army based in manchuria by 1937 when japan officially declared war on china the japanese military were in complete control not only of japanese politics but of her factories as well the japanese military begins to dictate what private manufacturing interests are producing the system works like this the military will decide that they need let's say a fighter plane with certain specifications it has to be able to fly a certain speed has to be able to carry a certain payload has to be able to resist certain kinds of fire what you then do is go to maybe five or six companies and say can you design a plane that will meet these specific specifications the companies then go away and design and probably test fly a plane that will meet those specifications the pros of this method if you are a military person is that you know you will get the aircraft that at least fulfills the needs that you want they weren't producing things in the dark what they produced certainly for the early years of the war was exactly what the japanese military wanted in october 1937 this is exactly what seemed to happen when the japanese imperial navy submitted the specifications for a new carrier-based fighter designated the 12 she to the leading aircraft manufacturers of the time including mitsubishi and nakajima corp [Music] nakajima take one look at the specs and they say that's absolutely impossible and they just they just get out of there they withdraw from the competition it's mitsubishi that says okay we'll take up the challenge because mitsubishi had an ace up their sleeve a brilliant young graduate from the university of tokyo's aviation laboratory called euro horikoshi his ability to build aircraft was identified by senior management of mitsubishi he sent overseas he learns he watches and he he comes back to japan willing to take risks harakashi himself actually recalls that he thought that mitsubishi chose him because basically he was young and inexperienced and therefore he wasn't going to be bound by convention and that he didn't actually know what was impossible his vision when it came to building aircraft was was outstanding there was probably no one in japan that came close to having that same kind of visionary approach to building aircraft particularly fighters and that's just what japan needs if you're going to build something like the xero because the navy's requirements for the a6 mitsubishi zero were extremely demanding it's almost as if someone in the navy sat down and said what is the most impossible airplane we can ask for yeah let's go and ask for that but i think the japanese navy were pretty clever they could see that they were going to have to fight a pacific war you're looking at combat over the pacific primarily against american or british warships and you're probably not going to have the numbers you're not going to out produce the americans or the british so the japanese whole philosophy in the interwar period is to prepare for war not by overwhelming in numbers but by having the best and so what they say is okay what would be the best fighter possible navy aircraft it is very much the military sort of saying okay this is what we want see if you can do it so when he was faced with this seemingly ridiculous list of requirements from the japanese navy what horakoshi does is just throws out the rulebook one good example is the way he cut down the weight of the plane to boost its range and maneuverability weight for an aircraft is a killer it makes it more difficult to get off the ground and it means it flies slower one problem is purely the idea of how the aircraft is built this american grumman wildcat is made in three sections fuselage two wings and the wings are held on the fuselage by bolts with big nuts they're heavy they're steel they add weight to the airframe the japanese engineer horikoshi looked at the problem and thought there was a way around it the zero was made effectively in one piece no bolts holding the wings on it's also got holes wherever there can be holes which don't affect the rigidity of the aircraft and it's made of a new material which is actually lighter than aluminium and not available to the americans to the end of the war this means that the zero is faster lighter and more agile than anything the americans had at the time direlament was seen as a new type of metal it was an aluminium alloy effectively a lighter version of aluminium than other manufacturers were using other manufacturers didn't see it as being strong enough to put into aircraft mitsubishi were almost a decade ahead of the americans in its use there the result was a plane like nothing anyone had seen before japanese zero is a low wing monoplane that's equipped with a powerful radial engine it effectively is a flying fuel tank it's got the fuel capacity to fly over 1100 miles that's about 1800 kilometers without the use of extra drop tanks a range almost three times greater than a spin fire once you've used a good percentage of that fuel that aircraft becomes very very maneuverable the aircraft has one of the finest wings that was designed up to that point having magnificent handling characteristics in the air in fact all the way through to the end of the war basically no other aircraft can turn with a japanese zero it's also equipped with two 7.7 millimeter machine guns mounted in the engine nacelle firing through the prop arc and then two powerful 20 millimeter cannons mounted in the wings they packed a punch they really did their weapons worked very well they were very effective there was no gun stoppages they were reliable weapons so it's setting this impressive standard in terms of performance in the air maneuverability and then the ability to lay down some pain through the use of machine guns cannons and you can even equip the mitsubishi zero with a bomb yet designing the impossible has its drawbacks as early test flights of the zero would show flutter is what you get when you put something like this piece of paper in an airflow now for an aircraft flying at slow speed not a problem it just simply flies along but if you actually get it into a flow like this it will flutter and eventually fold up if that was an aircraft wing that's the end of the aircraft so what the japanese did is they brought in an engineer and said how do we solve this problem and he came up with what's known as the elevator mass balance basically their weights in this case paperclips on the trailing edge of the wing this means now we've actually got weight to deal with the onset of the flutter it's now much more rigid the aircraft can go into a dive and it doesn't break up it worked very effectively to the degree that they didn't suffer from these flooded problems going forward and it was never an issue with the zero again the zero is not only the best naval aircraft it's actually one of the best fighters in the world and it would not take long before the zero would prove its worth in combat over china [Music] 19th of august 1940 12 mitsubishi zeros led by lieutenant tomozo yokoyama lead a formation of bombers to rain down hell on the chinese city of cheng king now this is the very first combat mission flown by the zero over china and you know what nothing happens the chinese they simply stayed away and the same thing happens the next day and the next for a month the japanese went up searched the skies of china looking for chinese fighters and the chinese very wisely decided they weren't going to have any of that and they kept their aircraft on the ground the chinese are very sensible in their reaction they can't fight with it so they avoid it wherever possible the luck of the chinese ran out on the 13th of september 1940 when a squadron of 13 zeroes ambushed a chinese squadron more than twice their size japanese accounts claimed that every single chinese aircraft involved was shot down certainly a large enough number to prove that the xero was the right airplane to do that job no zeros were even damaged let alone shot down it was the start of a predictably painful pattern for the chinese in the 18 months leading up to pearl harbor mitsubishi zero shot down 103 chinese aircraft for the loss of just two planes both caught by anti-aircraft fire but despite warnings of its dominance from u.s pilots in the chinese air force the u.s armed forces paid the zero little attention the american volunteer group the so-called flying tigers they encountered zeroes in combat in 1940 long before pearl harbor they found that the airplane could out-climb them it could out-turn them it had acceleration that was beyond them and it packed some potent firepower but when they reported this back to washington no one would believe them they go we've got something to match the zero it can't be that great they're wrong american fighter airplanes at the beginning of the second world war they don't stand much of a chance against the zero in air-to-air combat it was certainly seen in the early days as the preeminent fighter in the pacific theater to the point where there was a famous phrase coined by american pilots that if you saw a zero cent in your immediate vicinity you were outnumbered if you're coming up against naziro and you're in a single american aircraft you're gonna lose you're gonna lose because you can't keep pace with the zero it's faster it's more maneuverable crucially it can probably get in behind you much more quickly than you can get behind it so if you're a single american aircraft what you realize is avoid see that plane climbing to heaven like a skyrocket heaven's the wrong destination for that baby that's a zero the number one thing that american pilots are being told is don't dog fight the zero the one benefit you might have is the deep dive dive away from it and get the hell out of there as japan carved out its south pacific empire the zero ran rampant however it wasn't long before the cracks in japan's strategy began to show it may sound strange but modern wars are not won and lost by fighting battles because the key to victory is factories the second world war is won or lost by military production much of the military history we read are wonderful stories we read stories of combat brilliant generalship real people doing remarkable things the real story of war being won or lost though is one of equipment production it's a far more important story and it involves everything in the long term it really doesn't matter if you lose 350 planes at pearl harbor because you've got the capacity to make another 24 000 in the next year just like the americans do in 1942 they make 42 000 aircraft by 1944 they're making almost 90 000 aircraft so the factory represents the great you might say strategic weapon of the second world war i mean this is industrial production on a scale that just dwarfs what the japanese can do by the end of the war the japanese have built just over 50 000 combat planes the americans they turned out more than 300 000 you can't argue with numbers like that and you can't fight and beat numbers like that and the very nature of the japanese empire was starting to work against it the japanese plan was to use the resources of the dutch east indies that's coal steel and oil to supply the factories in mainland japan and to do that it had to use shipping and actually built two and a half million tons of ships which meant they were able to effectively link all the way through the southern pacific to japan providing the resources to build aircraft tanks everything they needed for the war and that was fine till america takes guadalcanal they capture the marianas islands and what they're able to do then is use their submarines to get amongst these japanese vessels and begin sinking them in enormous numbers they're then able to use aircraft to actually strike at the shipping sinking even more they actually lose about a million tons of shipping ultimately the americans are able to use their fleet of heavy bombers flying from the marianas to strike at factories in japan itself that would prove fatal because no matter how many excellent planes they may produce the war factories of japan do not exist in isolation the factory represents the end of a long strategic process it's not just sitting there churning out goods you have to get goods to it so a huge amount of effort in the second world war is just to ship the raw materials across thousands of miles to get them to the factory and very rarely is it one factory when you're talking about a piece of modern machinery such as an advanced aircraft these have a hundred thousand pieces you're talking a number of factory buildings the production problem was made worse by the philosophy of the military in charge the japanese army in the navy seemed to do things totally independently of each other they didn't seem on the same page pretty much about anything the navy develops the zero one of the greatest fighters in the war do they transfer that technology to the army no this is a farcical situation you've got the japanese they've got the best fighter on the planet but only one half of their armed forces are actually using it nuts added to this was the short-term nature of japanese military thinking the japanese high command had made this really huge assumption and that was that the americans are going to sue for peace immediately after the disaster at pearl harbor and the capture of the philippines by the japanese i think they saw a campaign that was perhaps only going to last maybe 18 months two years perhaps at most and actually you can see this reflected in their aircraft design because the zero was so all conquering the japanese navy didn't really anticipate the need for a replacement until what well into 1943 you're not looking to develop a high-tech aircraft three or four years down the road you're looking at building things that can win the war for you now as the war progressed japan's aging fleet of zeros was being stretched thinner and thinner it would eventually snap at a place called midway [Music] the long slow death of the japanese air force began in june 1942 at the battle of midway in the battle of midway the japanese sought to capture two islands sand island and eastern island what we call midway atoll and their hope was that if they achieve this they'll be able to draw out what was left of american naval power in the pacific for one decisive battle well that's not exactly what happened on the morning of the main action june 4 1942 the japanese fleet undergoes this series of cascading attacks that begin with aircraft that are flying from midway itself and that culminates in what we call the famous four minutes between 1020 and 24 am when three out of four japanese aircraft carriers are knocked out of the battle in swift succession the reason why they're knocked out is because this american tactic of actually forcing the japanese combat air patrol aircraft down to a low level so when these american devastator torpedo bombers mount this low-level attack what they're doing is that they're drawing down these hornet's nests of these circling zeroes the japanese combat air patrol flew in and engaged all of the torpedo planes shot them all down destroyed them there was nothing left of the squadron so the zeros have been in a dogfight and they may have won that particular scrap but they've got a big problem because that's been very expensive in terms of fuel they had been engaged in high performance air-to-air combat and so those aircraft had to land so that they could refuel and reopen now it's the timing at this juncture that's absolutely critical you've got all these arrows back on their carriers being refueled re-armed and that everything else was being refueled and rearmed below deck they're completely vulnerable and of course what happens is that suddenly coming out the sky you've got this group of american daughters dive bombers appearing and they can just see these completely carries below them when the american dive bombers begin diving down on the japanese carriers their bombs penetrate the deck explode on the hanger deck and set off secondary explosions explosions that are then fueled by fuel lines the japanese have effectively fallen into an american trap in just four minutes you've just got a single group of american daughters dive bombers turning three japanese aircraft carriers into basically funeral fires by the time that the battle of midway is over the japanese have lost hundreds of irreplaceable and accomplished naval aviators and they've lost four fleet aircraft carriers midway was a turning point not just because the japanese lost so many planes but because they lost over a third of their most experienced pilots in the firestorm japanese naval air force entered world war ii with possibly the most experienced and skilled cadre of naval aviators across the board the only problem is there aren't that many of them so you're dealing with at most 2000 really well-trained aviators on which the japanese naval war effort lies as pilot losses began to mount replacements were in short supply to train someone to be a pilot is a very complex process what really matters when you train a pilot is how many hours he's flown before he's thrown into combat crucially you have to put them in the pocket they actually have to have time to learn how the engines felt the thrust how the airframe worked together so in 1942 the typical japanese navy pilot could expect to put in some what 800 hours in a plane before he sees combat by 1944 that halves and you've got some pilots going into action with fewer than 300 hours flight time logged so as they headed into 1943 the pilots of the imperial japanese navy were becoming less and less experienced and flying ever older planes [Music] that would come back to haunt them when the americans struck back two years later at the battle of the philippine sea the greatest naval aviation battle of the second world war is the battle of the philippine sea which is to determine control of the mariana islands it involves 24 aircraft carriers and more than 1300 aircraft now what it's most famous for is something called the great marianas turkey shoot because over the space of two days from june the 19th to june 20th 1944 the japanese lose 426 aircraft in a series of all these suicidal attacks against the american fleet and the bulk of those aircraft was zeros because again the only fighter that the japanese navy had available to protect its torpedo and dive bombers or zeros they call it the great marianas turkey shoot for a really good reason the zeroes were actually really easy to shoot down and it actually reminded one american pilot the turkey shoots he used to take part in at home it's an apt to name for what was a very one-sided engagement what the americans say is the japanese were brave they would take extraordinary risks to try and do their mission but simply have not been trained well enough to fight directly with the well-trained american naval aviators now the pilot attrition of the last two years was really beginning to bite by 1944 two-thirds of the experienced pilots who had actually led the attack on pearl harbor were either dead or unable to fly anymore so this means that only about a third of the pilots who flew into the marianas death trap knew what they were doing and half of them didn't even make it to the combat zone the distance is about like flying from london to new york we're talking thousands and thousands of miles and it's also over open ocean so you've got these pilots flying the zeros they're no longer the steely-eyed stone cold warriors they used to be and you know what it showed when the dust settles at the end of the battle the philippine sea twice as many japanese aircrafts have been lost trying to get to the battle as were lost in the great marianas turkey shoot itself on the other side the americans had evolved going back to 41 there was nothing that could take on the zero but by 42 in the united states navy you had pilots that were flying in two ship formations what they called the beam defense what we called today the thatch weave named after the american naval aviator designs it which basically says the problem we have is that the zero can outmaneuver us and get behind us so what we'll do is we'll basically have two aircraft going zigzagging around each other and as they flew into a combat environment where the enemy was present they would simply watch the other pilot and if the other pilot noticed that a zero was setting up for an attack he would turn in toward his wingman the wingman would then turn in and the process of the aircraft weaving through one another would bring the zero within the gun side of the trailing aircraft to make matters worse a barely noticed incident on the periphery of the midway campaign two years earlier was about to pay great dividends to the us war effort in the skies in 1942 as the japanese are preparing to attack midway they launched a diversionary attack on the aleutian islands to try and draw american forces off that ends up being unimportant for the battle the americans don't take the bait but one thing that does happen is a japanese zero crashes into the soft body soil of the aleutian islands it dug in and went straight over and flipped over onto its back the pilot was killed instantly and the aircraft was there intact and a catalina an american flying boat happened to be doing a patrol in that particular area and saw the zero belly up on the grass the u.s military then ultimately recovered the aircraft took it back to the united states returned it to airworthy condition and then conducted significant test and evaluation flights with it and they're able to fully test and see what the enemy has on the one hand they understand now it's their aerodynamic capacity why it can fly so well but they also see its weakness the zero is a brilliant boxer with a great right hook but a glass jaw it has a punch it's fast it floats it's muhammad ali in terms of its offensive capacity but it's a terrible fighter as a defender because to be as fast and long ranged as it is it had to have almost no armor protection you only needed to put one round in this aircraft and it just blew up and so the tactics employed by american navy and army fighters in the years that followed all the way through to 1945 were informed by what we learned from that aircraft and the darkest days were still to come when the americans take the marianas in the summer of 1944 they can start transferring the famous b-29 bombers to the marianas and they can reach about two-thirds of japan v-29 bombers begin to subject the japanese to a protracted strategic air campaign crucially they can reach many of the great industrial cities of the time industrial cities such as nagoya which were very famous for aircraft production and they begin this assault on japanese factories and japanese aircraft production on the 13th and 19th of december 1944 us aircraft bombed the two great mitsubishi factories at nagoya in japan now those raids were devastating because they damaged the main engine factory and the factory that made the airframes net effect this cuts production of the zero by one-third what this meant is that the japanese weren't just gonna lose planes on route to the war zone they were gonna start losing planes before they had even been built as the war reached its most desperate stage the severe lack of planes and fuel caused by american bombing forced the japanese to extreme measures what had once been the lord of the skies was now converted into little more than a guided missile by 1945 the zero is repurposed as a kamikaze aircraft they find that the zero is an especially effective aircraft for getting in close and striking the desired target japan's kamikaze tactics are usually portrayed as some kind of cultural death wish but actually had a kind of logic to it if you look at the kamikaze as a strategic choice it is one the japanese take because of the japanese pilots aren't as great and their aircraft have weaknesses so what do you do fly the aircraft into someone you didn't have to waste much time training a pilot to do anything more that fly straight it's morbid but if you don't have to come back you can go a lot farther you only needed enough fuel for a one-way mission of course you are guaranteed to lose one pilot but if the attack was successful you would also cause the americans to lose one ship and several men on board so you know if you put it on a balance sheet kamikaze attacks make quite a lot of sense it also persuaded the americans the cost of landing on the japanese home islands would be too great so they decided to end the war swiftly in the most horrific way possible the american strategic air campaign against the japanese home island then goes through the ultimate end-all of escalations when on august 6 1945 an atomic bomb is used against the city of hiroshima and then on august 9 1945 an atomic bomb is used against the city of nagasaki right in the middle of all of that on august 8 1945 the soviet union declares war against japan and these events all coming together they force emperor hirohito to reach the conclusion that the japanese nation can no longer continue fighting and for that reason in the second week of august of 45 the japanese reach out to the united states to negotiate terms of surrender the second world war is over but while the zero and its makers have failed to win the war the lessons they have learned will serve them well in the peace to come [Music] as suddenly as it started the war came to an end and surrender ceremonies aboard the missouri 2nd of september 1945 u.s general douglas macarthur accepts the official japanese surrender on board the uss missouri in tokyo bay things looked bleak for japanese zaibatsu like mitsubishi which the americans planned to shut down what saved them was communism japan like west germany is actually saved by the cold war and the japanese had a hand in this themselves because you have an occasion when the japanese prime minister visits chairman mao in beijing in 1972 and he personally apologizes for the japanese invasion of china and what mao is said to have replied something in the lines of you don't need to apologize because if you hadn't done that the chinese communist party would never have survived so when matsuya tung and the chinese communists seize power and the nationalists of china are thrown out all of a sudden japan now seems indeed as a way to hold the line against an advancing communist power so americans become less hostile to the zaibatsu and companies like mitsubishi than they had originally intended to be the zabats were broken up but they're replaced by kyretsu as they're called which are large much looser but still interconnected networks of firms then in june 1950 communist north korea invaded its southern capitalist neighbor the korean war comes hot on the heels of the quote-unquote loss of china for the americans it's a double hammer blow japan's vital importance becomes instantly japan becomes essentially the forward base for the american and other forces fighting on the u.n side in the korean war and so therefore there's a lot of service production if you will to produce the various kinds of everyday goods that an army of that size constantly requires and this does give a bit of a kickstart to quite a large part of the japanese economy what japan essentially becomes is one giant war factory for the americans in korea and you've got large firms like mitsubishi they're able to use this to fund lots of lovely new investment projects that are going to get japan back on its feet when does the japanese car industry begin to take over the world when does japanese shipbuilding begin to take over the world it's all in this period because you start needing this japanese productive capacity in the wake of the korean war mitsubishi companies helped lead the way to japan's unprecedented economic growth throughout the 1950s and 60s so by 1951 you've got large firms like mitsubishi now they're able to start putting themselves back together again and they're beginning to benefit from this kind of somewhat unique mix of corporate collectivism on one hand and then you've got this kind of low tax incentives that are this really quite unique feature of the so-called japanese economic miracle and so you get the development of a highly successful economic model which involves very efficient mass production of high quality consumer goods for both the domestic and increasingly global export market and mitsubishi's old wartime engineers would have a surprising role to play in one of the most iconic creations of japan's economic revival the japanese bullet train is one of the symbols of the modern japanese economy and it symbolizes the supposed combination of extremely high tech with modern consumer society but the bullet train was suffering from a technical glitch which one of the designers of the zero would have found all too familiar now what he helped solve is one of the zero's problems and that is the flutter the zero is so light and so fast that actually at high speeds or when it dives it has a problem with stability now it's the post-war period and you're not making zeroes anymore what are you making you're making the fastest trains in the world that actually poses many kinds of same aerodynamic problems and so matsudara plays a key role in keeping the bullet train stable it's thanks to his research on the xero that the bullet trade is able to speed along the rails incredibly fast matsudara wasn't the only wartime engineer in the japanese national railway whose brush with the zero would leave his mark on the bullet train you also have another engineering figure in the jnr and that's a man called tadano miki at the end of the war as a problem was that the zero wasn't fast enough to get through the american air defenses so they needed something a lot quicker so what mickey was tasked with designing was something called the cherry blossom or the ochre bomber the oaker bomber looked like a bullet if you looked at it it was it was like probably more like a flying torpedo actually this was a jet powered single seat aircraft with a pilot that carried explosives on it that would begin gliding toward the target then it would kick in three solid rocket booster engines that would propel it at a significantly greater speed toward the target a speed so great that you just could not track it and deliver effective anti-aircraft fire against it i'm amazed that she astounded that they even hit anything that's the incredible part that they managed to sink at least two ships with okay bombers now miki like matsudara is asked to bring his wartime experience to the challenge of streamlining the shinkansen bullet train now the aerodynamic challenges presented by kamikaze plane diving are not that much different than posed by a bullet trains at high speeds and so you he can take the sort of experience from designing these aircraft and move it to the design of the bullet train and what he creates is this absolutely unique bullet shaped nose which gives the shinkansen its nickname the bullet train and if you look at a picture of the oka bomber what do you see you see that influence in the bullet train's design so you've got this situation what was originally designed as a suicide bomber has a far more productive and peaceful purpose as a key part of japan's high-speed railway network this might never have happened if the pressures of war had not pushed japan's engineers to the limits of their ingenuity japanese military engineers end up serving the japanese civilian economy and serving it very very well so throughout the 1960s and 1970s japan is at the center of a whole succession of major innovations in consumer products such as washing machines motor cars radios televisions and the like the technology behind the mitsubishi zero and its successors has played a key role in raising the land of the rising sun like a phoenix from the ashes of defeat helping it lead the way to the future of the world as mickey himself puts it technology is inherently something that makes people happy that's how it should be and he was dead right [Music]

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 179,653

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, pacific war, ww2 japan, mistubushi zero, zero fighter, japanese zero, kamikaze pilots, suicide pilots, kamikaze, ww2 documentary, war with japan, empire of japan, japan ww2

Id: 5Qbh2sPELOg

Length: 44min 6sec (2646 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 25 2021