The A6M Naval Carrier Fighter - Zero or Hero?

[Music] [Music] hello everybody welcome to this special video we I've been thinking about doing something along this line for a while but since there seems to be a little bit more interest than normal around the development of the Japanese in naval air on since of course they were the opposite number two some of the largest naval battles in the Pacific it seemed like as good an opportunity as any to discuss one particular aircraft a rep out which an awful lot has said and an awful lot is written and an awful lot of which is wrong that being at the a6m zero or zeke or whatever the japanese ended up calling it yeah this this thing has an awful lot written and said about it as I said it so some people say it was God's gift to fighters other people say it was old slow and obsolete and easily overpowered and everything in between so I thought well rather than me give a brief pre say about it how about actually asking someone who knows pretty much everything far possibly how to construct one from scratch welcome to my guest hi my name is Justin I guess very briefly provide background I have an MA and military history specifically intelligence history but the main marching grounds are the Asia Pacific War interwar period focusing predominantly on Japan I'm sure some of you are familiar with me I've popped up on a couple of other youtube channels but I'm happy to be here awesome thank you very much and again thank you very much for coming so so obviously particularly recently the a6m has appeared on screen in a movie about one of the larger battles in the Pacific War which we shall not talk about too much term to avoid the rage inducement that may occur but nevertheless in this video this is mainly going to be just in telling us the information and I'll trip in occasionally with observations or further questions so let's get on with that first question that I thought would be is so to put things in a bit of context what aircraft did the a6m actually take over from and when was the Asics and design die what aircraft was it contemporary with cuz this often often forms a bit of a confusion when it's compared to other aircraft like the Wildcat Hellcat or the fulmar etc mm-hmm well so they the aircraft had took over from was hopefully named the a5m type 96 carrier fighter is the general type designation and that was the immediate predecessor to the 0 the prototype first flew in January 1935 and that has started to fill out our roll out two units early 1937 I'm not gonna go into too much detail about the e5m because obviously that's not the point of the video but in short it performed very well in combat it could certainly be counted among the finest fighters in the world at that time it was also the first all-metal monoplane carrier fighter to enter service in any of the world's navies but it could reasonably be argued that the a5m and it's all more counter part the g3m marked a more important phase in the development of Japanese military aircraft than their more famous successors the zero and then the G for M because they were both they're both represented the culmination of years of effort within Japan to develop indigenous aircraft designs that were competitive with the other leading powers and with the a 5 m and the g3 M they finally accomplished that at least on the Navy side one R and a little bit of information is that the first Japanese fighters engaged by the US Navy's 4 F wildcat in February 1942 were not zeros unlike that Midway movie but a 5 m/s it may be bizarre to some American viewers but the Central Pacific the area closest to the US and Pearl Harbor in particular was actually a low priority area for the Japanese Navy in this early phase of the war what you could call I guess the main show for the Japanese Navy was occurring in Southeast Asia hence why these older aircraft in that case a modest number of a five M s and G 3 M s made up the Japanese offensive air power in the region okay yeah so I guess moving on to the zero specifically the preliminary specifications were submitted to Mitsubishi and Nakajima and the 19th of May 1937 I saw you know thinking back to the 85 M that's pretty much right at the time that the a5m was just entering service so they were already thinking about the next plane the specifications were then revised a bit in October 1937 based on combat experience in China we'll get to specific design requirements in a few minutes anyway so Nakajima took one look at them and they pulled out of the competition but meet CB she decided to push ahead with their design the prototypes first flight was April 1st 1939 and then it was re-engined to the engine it would eventually have in the production model the nakajima sup a12 and the first prototype powered by that engine flew on the 28th December 1939 I'll take a little side note for a second here I have to mention that the zero was used exclusively by the Japanese Navy Air Service the jet the Japanese had two different air services a Navy Air Service and an Army Air Service subordinated to their respective Armed Services you'll occasionally see books claimed otherwise or talk about quote army zeros but that's incorrect the army didn't even know if they got to touch a zero much less actually fly one combat Charles started on July 21st 1940 and then the zero claimed its first victims on September 13th 1940 12th Koko Ty's a6m2 s were scheduled to escort some bombers they were targeting Chongqing the wartime capital of China they faced 50 I 15 bists and nine I 16 fighters of the Chinese Air Force four zeros were damaged in exchange for 13 aircraft destroyed and 11 damaged on the Chinese side you'll often see book state that 27 aircraft were shot down but those were Japanese claims not confirmed kills to go off on a slight tangent because this could become a theme throughout this entire thing and honestly it's one of the most fundamental things you have to understand when you're looking at airpower is that everybody over claimed significantly and I do mean everybody you never take kill claims at face value if it's the only figure you have then you have to make sure that you state specifically that it's a claim just as one example during the air campaigns over New Guinea the Allies so that's Royal Australian Air Force Yousef fighters Youssef el amor Gunners and a gun crews they claimed over 400 I naan khatai zeros over the span of this campaign in reality 44 Tainan pilots were killed when their planes were shot down or crashed during the campaign so of those 44 12 were lost to operational causes or weather so when you do math that's a claim to kill ratio of twelve point four point five to one I assure you the Tainan cooked I wish they had over 400 zero over the course of the New Guinea campaign the pie not hookah type took part in both sides had a had a claim to kill ratio of roughly seven to one and I'll read a really short excerpt on this actually in an excellent unit history of the Tainan cocoa time sure no cool quote the most contentious issue to arise from a detailed study of this account is over claiming with so much invested by so many in the prestige of the tally of kills the reality is set the disappoint a cold analysis of overall claims reveals that both sides over claimed by ratio of around seven to one ie for every seven claims only one was a kill its conclusion unfortunately challenges the very platforms upon which many prestigious reputations have been built over the past seven decades however the evidence is irrefutable there are many reasons behind the state of affairs most of them honorable combat was usually fleeting witness cases of some rico or japanese bomber crews that were unaware that they had even be intact longer combats such as such as occurred in chases did occur the norm was a very short encounter with a few hundred rounds fired and then just skip a little bit over some detail here in such a dangerous setting with complex and speedy movements it is easy to see how several different pilots could claim against the same aircraft we see many instances where allied pilots are positive of a kill only for the record to confirm that their alleged victim happily cruised back to lay or a ball unscathed optimism will win over reality in any treacherous environment and New Guinea's wartime skies were no exception end quote and that's again just one example it happened everywhere there's I I could talk about this for 30 minutes just explaining a million different ways that over cleaning occurred but I immediately kind of read she reminds me of the shoot-down of Admiral Yamamoto where for a while after the p-38s came back they were absolutely adamant that they'd shot down three bombers despite the fact that the the aerial convoy only had two yeah yeah and that kind of thing is is widespread it just as one random example specific to the Pacific words fact specific to the 0 the 0 of the a6m2 when it hit when they engaged overboost which is what you'd call a gas wartime emergency power a WEP it would leave a smoke trail a visible very visible smoke trail of course if you're an American pilot you're flying around at several hundred kilometres an hour you're trying not to be killed your Adrenaline's going like crazy zero flashes in front of your gun sights for a second you shoot you see smoke and then you never see that zero again then you make the kill claim but in reality all that happened is he flew in front of you shot he engaged his overboost and smoke came out of the engine and then he flew off somewhere I mean that's just one of a billion different ways that over claiming happens and it's not them lying it's just that's the reality of aerial combat yeah so I guess to to put the zero into its context so talking about contemporaries and this isn't an exact science I tried to stick to aircraft that were actually either entering combat or had been in combat and we're still kind of forming the front line at that point in time so we're not getting into wacky prototypes and all of that stuff that for example I've omitted from it's December 1941 I omitted the typhoon because the typhoon was a raging dumpster fire for the first entry to service yeah but here we go so for July 1940 so again this is when the zero first entered combat or the combat zone for Germany the BF 109e for was the newest aircraft but it was the air fleet was still mostly made up of e1 and e3 so older variants but the UK it's the hurricane mark one with the hurricane work too shortly turning up and then this similar story for the Spitfire at mark 1 and then late a little later mark to us the f4 f3 kinda it's actually a few months newer than the zero and the buffalos hanging around p40 I didn't even bother trying to sort out key 40 variants I was gonna do it and then I'm like I I'm just not it's not happening various variants of the p40 so if we fast forward to December 1941 which of course is a pretty significant date Germany at that point has the bf 109f or the Fokker wolves are starting to creep into service so you're at the [ __ ] about the fokker wolf 198 to a3 the UK they're still rocking some hurricane mark twos but also Spitfire mark fives the u.s. f4 three by this point is solidly in service they've still got buffalos and frontline service and at this point it's the for TE is the latest variant there and there's also some older stuff in service at the u.s. that I'm ki 35s and stuff but no USSR I threw in for December 1941 they got I 16 still in frontline service leg 3 Dec 1 7 in very small numbers that's kind of puts the zero in its context one thing that this makes that I really want to stress is that 0 by the time it sees combat against the f4f kind of in the spring of 1942 it's not a brand new fighter it's been in front-line service for at that point over a year and a half which is kind of an interesting way of looking at it because it just because it was new to Americans fighting it didn't make it a new fighter yeah I mean looking at that list I mean two things stand out to me immediately especially with the the UK and u.s. fighters that were contemporary sure in July of 1940 which is that the the a 6mm is replacing the a 5m but the a 5 FS already a monoplane whereas the hurricane and the Spitfire are replacing the UK they're placing the gladiator and the f4 f is replacing the f2 ff3 F which are also biplane fighters so I guess I suppose you go was the AAA six enemies it's a second-generation monoplane at a time when a lot of other countries that notionally typically thought was up as being more advanced or actually only bringing in their first gen monoplane fighters yeah that's actually an interesting point to meet make as I mentioned the a5 em particularly in the naval context was a pretty novel aircraft for the time it had some features that were a bit dated for example a fixed landing gear but overall it was it was a nifty little fighter yeah I won't go as far as to say at some books and you see a lot of this overstatement about everything I think every reference book you open up they'll always say such and such was the best fighter introduced at such-and-such a point in time and I think it's just kind of a lack of scope they have knowledge of this one fighter that ends up being good and then they don't bother looking at what everybody else was doing because when you put the a5 em along side a lot of the stuff that was in service it's not like it was weeks ahead of everything else it was but it stood among them yeah my guesses ya know and I think what you said is well about that when the f4fs encounter them first that was probably also bears a important point because as well if you're talking about the mid mid 1942 period if somebody showed up being a Spitfire mark one you'd probably be looking at them going yeah yeah go go back a couple similarly if you saw if you well we know although obviously did get exaggerated a bit but the buffalos did get rather badly beaten up as well in that period the the a6 M is contemporary with those aircraft as we just said so that that I mean I obviously will talk what about their combat performance further down the line but there does it it's an important point to bear out that it's as and as you said it's not like the zero is brand-new just off the production line in the way that say the F for F 3 is almost at that point yeah the F for three I guess that they entered from memory November 1940 mmm and I can't remember when it reached units but so yeah it's a little bit newer than the the F or F but I guess one thing to drive home is that real life is not like war thunder or world of warships or any of those games where you always match like with like with a battle rating system or tears or whatever I mean when the the opening carrier raids its f4fs that we're beating the crap out of little @u 5ms that for the most part we're pretty much hopeless because there by that point they're well past their that's before date yeah I always think two of Kirishima versus Washington and yeah highlights a lot of the difference between aircraft and warships in that you can have something like yeah the 85mm is introduced about five years before before that fight and in five years it's gone from being decent frontline fighter to hopelessly obsolete when faced with an opposition whereas if you'd looked at something like I don't know a late-late generation town class cruiser or maybe a New Orleans class heavy cruiser they're still absolutely top of the line frontline combatants in 1942 and and will remain so for a while mm-hmm yeah the time scale you're operating on particularly from I'd say the mid 1930s and then into the war proper for aviation is nuts that's like a whole other discussion in and of itself but how rap I mean you you move from the for example in the Japanese maybe you go from there's a series of biplanes that had pretty much been in service for almost the entirety of the 1920s and then you replace them with more biplanes and then you immediately replace those with mono planes and then you immediately replace those with the second generation of model planes and then the war starts there's a lot of rapid development at the end yeah so so looping back to the zero itself what lessons did the Japanese Navy take into account when they were designing it because obviously they had the the sino-japanese war going on one of many sino-japanese Wars the latest iteration I suppose but yeah so were they taking into account combat lessons when they were putting putting it together yeah they certainly will they certainly were because they were the modifications were or the specifications rather were revised many of the requirements for this era were extremely ambitious but you can kind of draw a line just built off of predecessor it was just the a5m more the real lesson that came to the fore in a very big way during development was the need for a long-range escort fighter b5m it wasn't really short ranged for its day but it definitely lacked the reach needed to escort the land-based attack aircraft deep into China many of these on escorted bombing raids they'd be mauled by enemy interceptors there was a general trend of course within the Japanese Navy of quote out ranging the enemy that likely played some factor but really that the main overwhelming was one was they needed a fighter with extreme range to escort their bombers on deep strikes Nicholas Millman one historian of the zero he described the aircraft actually is the world's first truly long-range strategic as a strategic escort fighter and I think that's a very accurate description many works will talk about the impact of the war in China in relation to aircraft maneuverability I personally don't see it because when you would look at Japanese aircraft design before the war the same arguments have been had been happening since the early 1930s and they kind of just continued through the so-called China incidents as the Japanese referred to it at the time you would just see people that were arguing for more maneuverability and then they pull examples from a China theater and say AHA this is supporting our position and then the other people would scream back that they need more speed and range and sacrifice maneuverability and then they point to examples in the China theater to support their position so it was kind of just gave them a new pool of thing of examples to pull from but to the two sides were pretty entrenched at this point it's also worth noting that the Japanese army our service was far more insistence on maneuverability than the Navy in this period and that's actually reflected in the aircraft that they ended up getting so as far as design specifications for the zero as mentioned earlier the initial 12 she specifications were issued to by the navy in the 19th of May 1937 so that's before the or in China escalates in a huge way in July 1937 the revised in October of that year which is about a month after things have started to hurt that's learned a few months after and then I think oh I'm trying to remember something off the top of my head that's a disaster I think September 1937 heard escalating around Shanghai and that's where the Navy Air Service really gets dragged into things so but a month after that they're already revising specifications based on combat experience according to Milman 20 new requirements were modified or added fortunately he doesn't list them but I'll give you at least the requirements as they were rewritten in October yeah so purpose escort fighter with dogfight performance superior to that of its opponents it also must be an interceptor capable of destroying enemy attackers maximum speed of 270 knots at 4,000 meters it's 500 kilometers an hour rate of climb less than three point five minutes to 3,000 meters in altitude endurance 1.5 to two hours at normal rated power or 6 to 8 hours at economical cruising speed with a drop tank they don't give the the specification doesn't give the range in kilometers so I actually put the real ones in there about eighteen hundred and seventy kilometers on an internal fuel or three thousand 120 kilometers with a drop tank which and I cannot stress this enough is mind-bogglingly insane for a fighter of that period yeah I mean if I can just come in on that I suppose another way of putting that into context is that when the Allied bombing raids start on Germany in the middle of the war aircraft like the Spitfires and suchlike can't make that full round-trip and they can later on introduce drop tanks they can just about make it but they still can't get the more distant targets like Munich or Berlin and then obviously you have things like the p-47 and the p-51 coming in and this is hailed as a huge advance and their long-range escort fighters etc but the distance between the middle of England and this will may be leipzig nuremberg area mid to eastern germany is only a bat just under six hundred miles in in roughly straight-line so comparatively I mean six hundred miles of Swat but just under a thousand kilometers so comparatively speaking the zero has almost doubled that range and is in aircraft this that's over bailable two or three years before the Allies even start to think of it think of half that range as a problem yeah it's it's huge moving on armament they required to twenty millimeter cannon and to 7.7 millimeter mgs and also the ability to carry 260 kilogram bombs by the way those 260 color red bombs they were envisioned to use as kinda I guess what we would in modern parlance term ceders suppression a suppression of enemy air defense but it was a doctrinal that the zeros would strafe it also dropped 60 kilogram bombs for example on ships to soften them up for torpedo bombers and things like that to come in full radio equipment was also a requirement including direction-finding that's another relatively novel feature the direction-finding component specifically for single-engine fighter of the period takeoff run less than 70 meters with the 27 dot had written I can't possibly think of what that's worth fighting performance at least equal to the out of the a 5m and ultimately the a6m2 which is the the first production variant met or exceeded all of these requirements with the one exception of low speed maneuverability compared to the 85 M because it just wasn't gonna happen frankly that's a good thing because the sacrifices needed to accomplish that would have made the zero far less impressive and it ended up being in fact toyco she recalls after a particularly heated debate where you could yelled at by people for this row not being maneuverable enough he'd sketched out a different design that omitted the canons see he changed a whole bunch of things it got way slower but then it was it had turned into you know a 5 M 2.0 that would just be able to turn on a dime and but he thankfully he looked at that and went nope it's not going to have any kind of staying power it's pretty much gonna be obsolete upon arrival with no chance to upgrade so he threw that out and kind of doubled down on design that he ended up producing um Rico she I should actually I haven't explained to really how Eko she is G no Holly Co she was the lead designer or the head of a design team that designed the zero he wasn't alone I don't have everybody else's name but he was the head guy so he recalled being completely floored by the requirements and I don't blame him right away the zero was being called to do everything it needed to be an escort fighter and bomber interceptor and a carrier fighter the dichotomy between escorts and interceptor was the most troublesome because there's a lot of mutual contradictions there the former demanded long range and then you usually sacrifice speed and then just enough performance to deal with inner enemy interceptors while the latter demanded high rate of climb strong armament high speed way shorter range he they wanted both all of this had to be accomplished in a plane of course with an ever-present specter that it needed to also be able to fly off an aircraft carrier in holy cochise words it work why the requirement quote defied common sense end quote he also noted that the Japanese had limited resources and had to deal with constant pressure between the Yokosuka Cocotte I responsible for operational evaluation and all they wanted was a dog fighter extraordinaire and then the Naval Air technical Arsenal Jers responsible for flight testing they wanted long-range to be given the absolute priority even if it's sacrificed dogfighting performance so now you can kind of see why Nakajima looked at the requirements and they're just like nope and they left the competition immediately because they thought it was just a poison pill and any attempt was gonna be doomed to failure horikoshi after his initial shock he started to sketch some stuff out and he went oh maybe I can actually meet the requirements and as I mentioned above he actually managed to pull it off okay so quite quite the ambition when that when they came up with those design specs so one of the other things that's often said about the zero is that there were suboptimal design choices made due to limitations in the Japanese avionics and aircraft industry is there any actual particular merit to that there there is in there isn't mostly isn't in this one specific case of the zero where it didn't really have an overwhelming impact despite the extreme requirements and the infighting over what the zero should be and that's really to the credit of holy Koshi and the rest of the design team the aircraft that came out the other end wasn't badly compromised in any way for the time if you want to look at an aircraft that was badly compromised by certain features within Japanese industry that would be the Army's nakajima ki-43 which they're less I mentioned earlier the army air service was far more insistent on extreme maneuverability and they forced this requirement on Nakajima and the plane they got well one it was stuck in development hell forever and then when it finally came out the other end it was no this is where technical specifications and reality kind of diverged because it performed well but honestly it was pretty much obsolete upon arrival with very little room to meaningfully upgrade it and that's kind of what you get on one end of the spectrum but the zero actually came out fairly well balanced the one significant limitation that really did forcefully Koshi and the rest of the design team to really buckle down was the power output of available engines aero engine design and also propeller design were the two probably biggest disadvantages within the Japanese aviation industry eventually the engine that they ended up putting on at the Sakae 12 power output of it was modest for the time the a6 m1 which you almost never hear about that was the initial prototype with a much less powerful engine fully the sakai twelve came along on the third prototype which would become the a6m2 and it was such a huge boost to horikoshi and the team because finally they had an engine that was pretty at least within spitting distance of contemporary foreign engines in that category so the sake I put out a modest two though not bad for the time power of about nine hundred and fifty horsepower that's roughly a hundred two hundred and fifty horsepower lower than you would see on some near contemporaries like the f4f for example had a I think eleven hundred and fifty horsepower engine if memory serves so it's it's a noteworthy difference but not the end of the world the Sakae 12 itself was actually stupendous small rugged extremely reliable powered and whole number of famous Japanese aircraft however the modest power output and combined with the extremely ambitious requirements ensured that Mitsubishi really needed to be absolutely ruthless with weight reduction in aerodynamic efficiency that isn't necessarily sub optimal but it greatly complicated the design process and also meant the zero would be a tricky plane to upgrade looking down the road because what came out the other end around this restriction is an aircraft that was exceptionally well balanced and the second you started adding a little bit some weights here and there it started that you would get massive performance drops that you hadn't that they really hadn't anticipated now there's a there's a couple of elephants in the room that being armor and self-sealing fuel tanks and sure people are screaming at their monitors about it we have a whole section on it it's coming city of your angry comments yeah yeah when you talk about the balance bit sort of weed with it within my own little section in warships that kind of reminds me of how in in the age of sail you could have a ship that was reputed under one captain to be an absolutely superb sailor and could out that outmaneuver and out speed almost everything else in its class and then under the next captain it became just a wallowing pig in it would often be very minor things such as where where you stored all the fresh water and that that build change in where the ballasts gravity was a completely changed the Saline quality of the ship even though to an outside observer it would seem that nothing nothing had actually been become any different oh yeah that's fascinating okay so as we looted to you in the introduction the a6m most commonly known as the zero some people call it the Z Kors heh heh I've also heard I don't know but maybe there was some kind of Japanese name for it as well so so how does what was actually called oh boy ok well strap yourselves in so the Japanese and I mean this is nowhere near as bad as the engine designation systems which to this day I haven't sat down to sort out because I you know I I wanted vacuum the house or do dishes or anything else but so for the four aircraft specifically let's get the simple once out of the way first so the Allied code name for the zero was Sikh however would the Allies would also refer to it as zero in wartime reports they'd use the two terms interchangeably it was only it was actually the only Japanese aircraft that I guess you could say shared the honor of both Japanese and the Western Allies referring to it as the same thing I don't want to read into that too much but I think it maybe indicates a certain level of respect for the fighter that they didn't give other Li or other Japanese aircraft I also probably makes sense because zero would just that where they ended up drawing it from it's just a snappy easy name to say in either language so yeah the Japanese often referred to it informally as they same zero fighter now official designations start to get messy they come into existence at different times then there are varying degrees of usefulness in my opinion I'll explain the two most relevant and why for one over the other so the first is the type system the system is relatively straightforward at least for our purposes zero was designated type zero carrier fighter a number comes from the last two digits of the year it entered service in this case 1944 those of you who like what last two digits why isn't it type forty well it's because at that time the Imperial Japanese calendar it was the year 2600 that's kind of the that's based on mythical founding dates of the Imperial royal household okay of course they dropped one digit because it was redundant in this case although you have seen written records from the Allies and such which did say type zero zero um think of that as what what you will I personally don't dislike the type system as it's prone to a lot of confusion what I'm using case I actually found that's also historical is I mean stomping grounds are interwar US intelligence assessments of the Japanese um and one report I found where the poor naval attache that put it together he understandably confused features from the type 99 carrier bomber the type 99 late bomber and the type 99 twin-engine light bomber and then it ended up coming up the other side is this weird fictional type 99 bomber Frankenstein Frankenstein's monster that I should say yeah and I I just chuckles and I'm like I feel you bro but officially the type system is where the two number modification system was also attached so for example for the famous carrier fighter in 1942 the model 21 so it's type 0 carrier fighter model 21 a model number is rendered and pronounced in English as 21 in this case however it is actually 2 1 the first number indicates changes to the airframe and the second indicates changes to the powerplant so in this particular case one change was made to the airframe over the preceding model 11 the in the addition of folding wingtips no changes were made to the powerplant so that's stayed at 1 that might open some eyes for people that are more used to looking at model numbers because they bounced all over the place seemingly at random and it's because it is actually broken down in that way okay yeah that makes sense cause over suppose you I mean for me I'm used as a British person I'm used to seeing like Spitfire mark 1 Spitfire mark 2 etc logically progressing up the chain and I suppose you've got like F 4 F 1 F 4 F 2 F 4 F 3 alone likewise p-51 ABCD so I suppose so yeah if to an outside observer if you're looking at and it's sort a 6 mm to model 11 you might think all that's that's the equivalent to mark 11 there must be a whole bunch of discarded variants between before that but actually that so that represents the first model yeah yeah the frigate first production model that's why you go from 11 to 21 to 32 back to 22 so to add further confusion before 1940 to a different modification system was used for the type designation where a mark number was placed between the type number and aircraft type to denote large modifications and then a model number was placed at the end to no minor modifications so for example type zero mark one carrier fighter model - you don't see that rendering very often even the Japanese don't like it yeah you can vaguely understand the concept behind the model to one or model 1 1 etc than that that's just what yeah it's confusing um thankfully there's another designation system that I honestly prefer that is the short designation system it's actually quite similar to the US Navy's system designation hmm it's my preferred method for Japanese Navy aircraft because you can identify the plane right down to the sub sub variant with relatively few syllables and you're not going to be as confusing people as much so the zeros designation under the system commonly rendered in English anyway is Mitsubishi a6m for reasons up at 2 in just a second here meet CB she's kind of redundant in that instance so to fully break down the system and I have to get more specific and again I'll use the workhorse 0 through 1942 is my example and I've also added the model number to the end which is commonly done in English because I makes things extra clear keep in mind this was not used in the official short as nation system the model system was for type and the short designation system stood on its own I'm combining the two because otherwise it gets very confusing anyway so for this I'll break down a 6m to model 21 so the first letter indicates aircraft type a is the code for carrier fighter this first number indicates the number of aircraft under that type so in this case six is the sixth carrier fighter ordered by the Navy the second letter indicates the company that designed the aircraft in this case m4 meets abhi XI and the second number indicates the major variant or models so too is the second major variants of these six m1 her starting up the a 6m a 6m one being the preceding one and that was the prototype that was rien Geneva that change large enough that they got a new major variant auto attached to it I mean the model number I stick on the end is as I explained above it's just there for clarity the other main part of the short designation system was a designator for minor modifications these were indicated by a lowercase letter ABC etc so for example the a6 m3 a that particular sub variant of the zero had a new type of cannon installed again I would personally say a6 m3 a model 22 just to make it clear what I'm talking about but that isn't official I know that everyone listening is thoroughly confused and praying for death we can foresee maybe maybe there should be a special sentence for people who displease me Amman on my channel I can put them in a room that's just labeled chat Japanese aircraft designation and there's a special 9th level for aero engine designation yeah okay so so obviously we discuss where the aircrafts come from when it's come into service and what were actually calling the the blasted thing so it obviously sees it's it's off main loading combat with against the Chinese and such beforehand its its main claim to fame I suppose is its performance in the Pacific conflict against America and then later on the rest of the Allies so how did the Asics mi6 and Chagas actually compared with the other naval aircraft of 1942 that it was running into weather did it have any particular strengths or weaknesses compared to its opponents at that time mm-hmm so first of all I'll explain how I'm gonna handle this for the purposes of this chat I'm not gonna start opening the can of worms of listing endless flight characteristics or else we'll be here for the next eight hours and then trying to rectify discrepancies between sources and then juggling dozens of fact that impact performance it's really not a simple thing to do and it must be handled very carefully since this discussion is broader in scope its kind of meant to be a basic introduction I'll predominantly couch things in relative terms tends to be more helpful for understanding anyway I'm so to drive this point that I'm trying to make home a little bit I want to quote an opening from a fire comparison work that I have just indicated in a little bit of what I mean so quote stating that airplane B had a maximum speed of 345 miles per hour at 14,500 feet while airplane a could obtain 380 miles per hour 20 1500 feet tells the reader nothing how fast were they at 16,000 feet or 5,000 feet or 30,000 feet ie at the same flight condition which had the better climb rate at 5,000 feet what were the rates of turn at sea level at what speed did they stall what their flaps up at 15,000 fleet feet at conv at weight at 10,000 feet how about at any altitude the reader is interested in and quote etc etc the gist is is that this kind of discussion is a rabbit hole we haven't even talked about context which honestly is by far more important than technical characteristics so with all that aside let's move into this so I'm not gonna bother comparing the F to a or the F for F 3 or British stuff just for the sake of time as chats are you gonna be at least two hours let's focus on the classic struggle between the f4 f4 and the a6m2 model 21 so first off the 0 had an all around vision canopy which was not relatively novel actually for when it was introduced and it certainly gave it an advantage over the f4 f4 which had poor reword rearward this ability particularly after they added the armor plate or the f4 f4 had the armor plate standard um I'd be that being said I don't want to overemphasize it too much it's just a minor little thing that often people don't think about 0 was faster than the f4 f4 at all altitudes they were closer matched at least at sea level but higher than that the 0 had a pretty pronounced advantage this was made more pronounced because the 0 had far better acceleration than an f4 f4 which obviously worked into American pilot impressions of the relative speeds of the aircraft so even if I just give an altitude their speeds were closer they were both the same energy state and accelerating the zero would pull away way faster than an f4 f4 which would give American pilots this impression that the zero is just going way way faster than an F where F four even though that's not necessarily the case given specific altitude yeah I mean we're gonna discuss a little bit more about that for further on but that is in a particularly interesting point cause when I was growing up and I'm listening to early be personal early opinion forum formed about the zero there was there was a constant undercurrent of people characterizing the zero as extremely maneuverable but slow compared to imperial Allied aircraft and obviously at at nine nineteen forty two that's not actually the case yeah in this specific instance it's it's actually not will get today yeah the point of the zeroes specifically the a6m2 speed a little later on so that's yeah a mess but yeah there is at least truth to the zero being faster at least compared to a certain aircraft it was fighting yeah the zero blew the f4 f4 out of the water when it came to operational range and and then it's just running up the scoreboard when you consider the f4 f4 wouldn't actually get dropped tanks until the later part of 1942 that was a major complaint leveled against the f4 f4 by pilots made complicated air operations greatly and it limited the f4 f4 z-- offensive punch and of course it reduced the amount of time it could loiter over the fleet which is another unkind of unsaid factor when it's not just about striking range it's also about how long a plane later which of course for a fighter tasked with defending a fleet is a very useful trait to have the zeros rate of climb was significantly better than an f4 f4 which also made the zero excellent in vertical maneuvers and zoom climbs something they exploited constantly the f4 f4 spork climb rate was another common complaint among pilots it hindered its ability to react to incoming threats at higher altitudes because it just was not a good interceptor that is why early warning provided by for example Coast Watchers and radar Jared Waddell canal campaign was absolutely decisive the early warning given to the f4 f4 z' gave them just enough time to climb up above the Japanese or they arrived which mitigated one of the main disadvantages of the aircraft without early warning the war in the air over the gone over Guadalcanal would have been gone very different um so to give a rough time frame for example they usually get roughly 40 minutes early warning if everything was going according to plan of a Japanese attack and that was almost the exact amount of time that they needed to climb all the way up to I think was about thirty thousand feet is what they would aim for to guarantee an energy superiority over the incoming Japanese the zeroes low speed manoeuvrability was superior of course that's probably the most famous trait there's a poor gunnery platform at high speeds however because flight control their flight controls began to lose their responsiveness particularly in roll so above 289 kilometers an hour which is pretty slow aileron control would start to stiffen and then a three hundred and seventy kilometers an hour which is still relatively slow the aircraft became difficult to roll and that was a major complaint among zero pilots and it would be one of the focuses of improvement on the next model of zero the a6 m3 model 32 the f4 f4 could die faster than the zero the one thing to note is that the zero could stay with it for a short period at the start of a dive the amount of time it could stay with an f4 f4 depended on how steep the wildcat was diving this is a similar story with all Allied aircraft as it was found that pilots thought they were sleeping diver than they actually diving C actually were the zero could stay in firing range for an extended period of time in those cases that is why as the board progressed kind of a standard evasive maneuver for Li allied pilots gradually became a spiraling dive which forced the zero to not only dive but also try to roll at high speeds which were you know that's the two things that the zero was bad at doing so it pretty much guaranteed that you would be able to escape the generally better dive performance of heavy American aircraft was of course famously exploited time and time again to escape unfavorable engagements and this was paired with the f4 F's trait that it was actually a pretty good gunnery platform at high speeds it maintained its responsiveness which made it well-suited for hit-and-run attacks as long as it had an energy advantage over its opponents and what I'm talking when I say energy I mean the combination of kinetic and potential energy which is just air speed and altitude so you'll see a lot of discussion of energy advantage or disadvantage when you're talking about air combat and that's all they're talking about it's kind of like having two high ground I guess in a land example yeah we're having the weather gauge I guess yeah yeah okay bring it back around to the nautical the armament of the two aircraft was quite different neither was poor but uniform armament 50 calibers was definitely superior in my opinion and fighter a fighter combat and that that is when they weren't jamming which was actually a recurring problem in the f4 f4 that took a little while to iron out it was something the the guns themselves are extremely reliable but it was something to do with how they were actually mounted in the wings um we'll talk about the zeroes armaments a little later on in its own section the f4 f4 could absorb of course absorb more punishment than zero very famously again we'll get to the question of the zeros durability a little later overall in my opinion and I think this is a pretty sick to say the academic consensus the two aircraft were closer matched than the popular conception the zero had more on paper advantages when you look at just characteristics in a spreadsheet but it wasn't sigh Civ and the air campaigns reflected this reality with losses matching up very closely at times the f4fs would come off better and at times the zeros would in a great fight for model canal for example the battles were very seesaw the winner in an individual engagement had almost always been the side that started with the altitude advantage as I said context matters a lot yeah I suppose that that plays into Z as you said earlier about the the early warning of available at Guadalcanal which meant you the Allies had more chance to have that advantage okay well obviously yeah with getting on to some of the the more specifics bearing in mind has just been said one thing I have seen floating around about the zero quite often is that is the claim that Japanese pilots would prefer a close in turning dogfight whereas US Navy pilots would prefer to boom and zoom from from altitude on on to the their enemies and that the zero was incapable of sort of matching that now is that actually true and regardless regardless of whether or not it is um what were the tactics that the a6m pilots did actually use and how effective were they when they were used against Allied aircraft yes this is a great question because this is obviously one of the most famous dichotomies I can think of for world war ii air combat so of course us tactics are very well known so i'm not gonna waste any time there but i'm gonna drill down on Japanese Navy fighter tactics specifically a little bit so the dogfighting and tail chasing Japanese it's a very common line you'll see that a lot in books will have some variation on that claim and many of those books are actually excellent histories however this is not really the case when you at the aerial engagements in detail and I'm not the first person to point this out that goes at least in English to John lundström who's two books on the Pacific naval air war from Pearl Harbor Guadalcanal our superlative and authoritative I cannot recommend those two books more for anyone that's interested in its era a period of air combat specifically the naval air combat and not nor is He alone with more and more works focused on Japanese naval aviation and using Japanese sources they're kind of coming to the same conclusion even if they're not aiming at it so even if the point of the book isn't to prove such-and-such tactical technically speaking um they're proving it just by describing in detail their example uh examples of air combat and I've accidentally stumbled across this in my own research as well which kind of like raised my eyebrows when I first saw it because I when I always had that impression in my mind and it really just confirms lundström as astute observations that he made in his two books and out of anything in this chat it'll probably come as the biggest shock and that is the Japanese Navy Air Service pilots had the same emphasis on hit-and-run attacks that their US Navy counterparts did and it becomes obvious very quickly if you look at details but it can be missed easily if you're skimming over them and that is why I suspect it's kind of still misrepresented in a lot of the literature is most of the historians that have looked at this subject have been focused on other things the naval battle the land battle the overall campaign etc so the descriptions of air combat tend to be vague they just kind of throw in a lot of descriptors they're about agile zeroes and nimble zeros and the zeroes attacked but there's no detail or enough death for you to convey what these zeroes are actually doing much is made of Li training and information bulletins to avoid dog fighting with zeros and those that exist they seem to assume that is proof that the Japanese Navy pilots wanted to always dogfight just as there's an assumption that just because the zero was a good dog fighter that was the default mode for Japanese Navy pilots and as far as I can determine the evidence just isn't there to support that line of argument dogfights happen well yeah they happened everywhere they happened in Europe they happened in Asia they happened in where you can think of just depending on the context a dogfight could break out and often did wasn't just all hit and run all the time for any side for example if you had insufficient energy to do a hit-and-run so in other words the targets you need to attack or about are moving about as quickly and are at about the same altitude as you there's no real opportunity for you to hit and run other than maybe make a head-on firing pass and then try to run away that way which is not ideal or you could just opt to accept a dogfight for any number of reasons and sometimes just the tactics that the preferred tactics of both sides they break down and they would just get stuck in it just happened now the zeros and the pilots that flew them were good at dogfighting so allied the Allied powers were right to tell their pilots to specifically avoid odd fights because otherwise without that information they might just accept a dogfight because again that's just the nature of air combat that being said hit-and-run energy fighting as we would call it was a preferred tactic for both sides and please note I'm being specific to the Japanese Navy air service here the Japanese army our service I would say is a lot more stereotypical they would start to shift their tactics in this direction as well but it took them well into the asia-pacific war to do so their preoccupation with clothes in dogfighting during the early part of the war is very evident so in other words when you look at vivid descriptions of Japanese army or service combat they are flipping around and trying to turnfight everything I'm outside of one experimental unit using a key 44 s but generally speaking they were all emphasizing on turn fighting whereas in contrast the Navy had been using hit and run fighter tactics since the war in China of which we have numerous vivid descriptions okay yeah I mean that that is interesting you mentioned about the telling telling allied pilots to avoid dogfights for the reasons you specify because that that plays into I don't know if we're going to about it a little bit later on but it does play into an ink at one of the more famous encounters with the against the Australian Spitfires over Darwin we're on on paper the Spitfire mark 5 is technically I think is more agile than the zeroes that it faces off against but in practice it all devolves down into a horribly messy dogfight and the zeroes dominate and indeed the only the only pilot pretty much on Australian side who who actually shows off what the Spitfire 5 was capable of doing is the one guy who's actually experienced and has a combat record but everyone else who isn't isn't quite up to speed on that gets taken apart by the by the Japanese pilots who as you say that they're actually trained for that to go through some examples here because I'm sure there's probably some people already doubting and slamming their keyboards right now so first off the the Americans were not the first to use hit-and-run fighter attack ticks against the Japanese you kind of get this perception in the English literature that Chennault was the brilliant super genius that invented it actually that was Soviet volunteers well I should say quote volunteers that had been sent to China from 1937 there was actually a significant Soviet air presence in China from 1937 and they developed such tactics and used them against the Japanese air services in fact it's actually almost creepy how how similar their their learning curve is to the Western Allies and that they start out they're far more willing to accept dogfights and then I am reading US intelligence reports that are conveying what's happening to the Soviets and they're like I have a report that literally the entire gist of the report is Soviet volunteers have been specifically told to stop dogfighting and instead to use hit and run now initially as the as the fighting first starts in China dogfighting was very prevalent and even among the Japanese Navy Air Service however you start to notice a transition away from it pretty quickly and I'll give you a couple examples I mean I'm not gonna list every single example or all day but in January 1938 Japanese Navy pilots actually used hit-and-run tactics during a fighters sweep over nanchang so several Chinese and Soviet pilots they were climbing and they were attacked by a 5ms that dope out of the clouds and it really emphasizes the a5m is a way better dog fighter than a zero so they dive in from above after the a5m made their firing passes they moved out ahead and zoom climbed back up to altitude this was repeated throughout the engagement and eventually three eye six teams were shot down at no point that they start tape chasing tails or needlessly wasting their energy to turnfight even though in this case the a5m could easily win a turn fight against an AI 16 but they opted to use hit-and-run tactics they never turn again in August 1938 a 5ms took turns making high-speed diving passes on a Chinese pilot's Gloster gladiator before zoom climbing back up out of reach Japanese Navy fighter tactics that emphasized hit-and-run and energy fighting were actually so common that they introduced some confusion into Allied intelligence reports and that's where my research comes into things because my first introduction was through the lens of American intelligence so some American intelligence reports emphasis sumed that these tactics that they were observing indicated the zero lacked maneuverability so here a couple quotes from a July 1941 US Intel report on Japanese Navy fighter tactics in China quote according to Chinese reports and judging by their from there apparently long fuselage these planes referring to the zero here do not have a small turning circle and are not very maneuverable unquote the Chinese reports in question noted the reluctance of Japanese Navy pilots to dogfight this is also corroborated by the account of a captured Japanese bomber air crewmen who vividly describes what we would call I guess boom and zoom or energy fighting in the vertical I'm literally word for word it's how I would define it and that's what he described as standard Japanese fighter tactics to the interrogators so to continue this report quote Chinese pilots report that the Japanese will not engage in a turning duel I'd like to make a diving attack and then a steep climb the Chinese Russian designs planes cannot follow in a climb and if they fall off or when the Japanese otherwise gets a good altitude advantage he kicks his plane over and dives again on the Chinese plane which may be nearly stalled the Chinese find the enemy's zooming tactics hard to neutralize unquote the report from April 1940 so this is before the combat debut of the zero stated that quote Japanese fighters always approached an enemy formation in open echelon of sections always with an altitude advantage and quote collectively the Japanese pilots kind of referred to their tactics as the chung chien method which is the gist is don't attack without some kind of advantage in altitude or numerical or both formation discipline also improved through the China incident early on formations would often break up and it would just become a wild free-for-all however that became less frequent as the scale of the air war increased because more planes forced better coordination and the Japanese continued to gain experience through the conflict and then this was cemented in immediate lead up to December 7th 1941 with intensive formation training they specifically focused on the Showtime shoot eye level which we'll get to in a second so moving into the war proper against the Allies a council Japanese hit-and-run fighter tactics against the Allies are so numerous we we'd be here for days if I go through them because these are standard tactics one American pilot commented after an action after-action report against Japanese zeroes on September 27th 1942 that in his opinion they had quote generally poorer fighter tactics and why well his reason was zero quote zeroes could not be shaken by us if they would shop their throttle and sit on our tails and quote in other words the American pilot was criticizing the Japanese for not being willing to dogfight enough now I don't agree with his assessment that that was poor tactics hit and run on energy fighting was just the way aerial tactics had moved around the world you didn't want to thought fighting all the time but it was very clearly it very clearly indicates that the Japanese Navy was pilots we're not just chasing tails when even the Americans are like maybe these guys could actually dogfight more I'll give you just a couple examples here one I'll actually pick one for the Royal Australian Air Force just as I can so on May 2nd 1942 three RAF Kittyhawks and seven Airacobra tempted to intercept some Tainan cocoa ties zeroes and the zero spotted the incoming flight it climbed up above them formed into echelon as a chew toy which is a nine plane formation of three show tie though in this case there was actually only eight zeros because one had mechanical issues and couldn't take off and then they proceeded to make high-speed hit run firing passes on them so we're starting to see a pattern here yeah for my second and last example I will read a vivid description of one of the most famous aerial engagements of the war from lunch terms the first team Pacific naval air combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway and that is Jimmy fetches division of vf3 against a massive amount of Kido boot eyes combat air patrol at the Battle of Midway I'm not gonna read it all because his description goes on for about 10 pages I think which kind of illustrates my point is think of this engagement and other books on the Battle of Midway you might get a few paragraphs if you're lucky there isn't a lot of vivid detail as far as the tactics employed they're just saying the zeros attacked that they're talking more about that Thach weave and everything I mean and I think that this will bear out why some of these misconceptions have persisted so long and also notice a couple of other interesting points in the narrative here and I think this is a really an excellent example of Japanese naval fighter tactics and I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit so at this point the one Wildcat that will be shot down has already been shot down the first zero to scream in from above singled out Macomb burrs wildcat as its target in a high rear attack its gunnery was excellent from behind his seat mccomber heard loud noises a seven point seven rounds zipped through his planes in Panaji and bounced off the armored plate back of the cockpit bullets knocked out his radio and penetrated his aluminium emergency fuel tank but fortunately f6 f6 s controls remained intact and the tank was empty purged with carbon dioxide confronted with overwhelming fighter opposition thatch at first thought - no nose down gain speed and support the torpedo planes the swifter zeros never gave him the chance by the time F f4fs had descended the 3,000 feet Japanese brought them to bay by means of relentless individual high speed hit-and-run firing passes dodge had to break off and maneuver defensively or be shot down the combat quickly assumed a deadly pattern diving in one at a time each Japanese closed within firing range opened up with intermittent bursts then board passed the f4 f4 's in order to recover below in a head a swift zoom climb then brought the zero out of reach and back up above in position to make another run when its turn came that's was most impressed with the skill and coordination on the part of his opponents essentially there was a zero making its run on him at all times much later estimated the interval between successive zeros to be 20 into 30 seconds only very rarely did the Japanese attempt any kind of attack other than above rear and this combat refutes criticisms that the Japanese were only tail-chasing dog fighters under pressure the three vf3 pilots slid into a near line of stern formation with the trailing plane a step down behind the leader ouch instinctively knew the best chance for survival lay in maintaining formation and countering each attack he was too low to his dive away an escape and the pack of meat species above one and nothing more than to see the f4f split up and run notches first defensive maneuver was to lead the division into a sharp turn away from the attacker after he saw the zero come in at the full moment committed to its run the turn away presented the attacker only a full deflection shot and for a zero and a high speed died it was difficult to draw a lead again zero or as a high-speed gunnery platform touches timing had to be just right to disrupt his opponents aim trailer mccomber most often was the target he watched his each zero successively slid into its run moving with deadly grace and he called fetch on his dead radio not realizing it was functioning as the Japanese flashed into shooting range mccomber would Inc up and down from the side-to-side the Lannister information permitted some independent maneuvering without risk of collision Macabre soon discovered that a shark short sharp pushover seems to disconcert the Japanese the most since they were holding because positive G and making their runs and could not easily and smoothly adjust their point to beam downward again more indications of the job when you're making high-speed diving passes with the zero it's not ideal match timed his turn away about the same time Connor would begin jinking all this depended on where the zero was in its run even mccomber stuck behind fetch in his turns let him direct all counter moves and it keeps going on and on and on however one very interesting point at the end here is that basically each zero they keep making the hit-and-run firing passes and all that could do is evade and then make a quick snap shot and usually they were already up and out of range however one of the in fact first of history kills the day makes what I almost want to call the mistake as in one of the probably the most common stick made by a Japanese naval fighter pilot was after making the firing pass they would pull up into the zoom climb too quickly which brought them up right in front of the Wildcat and that's what Jimmy fetch in this case for the first kill abuses because the zero pulls up right in front of his gun sights at close range and he shoots it down so that's a pretty vivid description of these kinds of fighter tactics and again in one of the most famous engagements of the war think of time you won't get into tactical organization in much detail very briefly the basic Japanese tactical formation for their fighters until the end of 1943 was the three planes show Thai you will sometimes see it described as a copy of the British Vic but that's incorrect the shirt I started that way it was significantly reformed do to combat experience in China from 1937 and then by December 1941 it was really its own formation I was far more flexible rarely entered combat in a v-formation instead of adopting left or right Escalon or line of stern depending on the tactical situation and it proved highly effective atchoo tie was the other formation that had significance at the tactical level and that generally consisted of three show ties for a total of nine planes at least on paper theoretically there are a lot of complicated maneuvers that could be conducted by a Chu tie but really it only often maintained cohesion at the start of an engagement and if the engagement devolved into a dogfight the component show tie would tend to operate independently the show even with the reforms to make it more flexible was inferior to what would be called finger for or Sh form permission the Japanese Navy would eventually move toward adopting a finger for for plane formation consisting of two pairs working together that would become the standard by the end of 1943 I could go into way more detail that will just leave discussions of formations there the gist is that the Japanese Navy fighter tactics as they had matured by December 1941 they worked well and bore much similarity to the US Navy when it came to hit and run energy fighting and deflection shooting the US Navy in the Marine Corps were the only two air services to extensively trained their pilots and making full deflection shots years before the war and what I mean by a deflection shot is really just approaching a target from any angle that isn't directly astern or directly ahead so you have to leave target yeah most air forces like Yusuf Luftwaffe RAF Japanese army air service they focus predominantly on setting up the zero deflection shots so directly astern are in front keep in mind that doesn't mean nobody in those services did deflection shots there just wasn't a lot of extensive training and making full deflection shooting that was just pretty much unique to the US Navy and US Marine Corps the u.s. Navy Air Service actually did a little bit of training on full deflection shooting but nowhere near extensively and arguably that was a more important advantage than hit-and-run tactics at least that's what lundström argues because the ability for US Navy and US Marine Corps pilots to consistently hit aircraft at full deflection was a huge advantage yeah I suppose if you if you're trained mainly to sit on somebody's tail you've got to get whereas if you're trained a deflection shooting that opens up you tube to fire on an enemy an awful lot more angles mm-hmm to get specific for the Japanese Navy fighter pilots they preferred high side runs with the deflection shots up to thirty degrees though as we see they generally opted for lower deflection than that high side runs were also optimal for building up enough airspeed to pull out ahead and under the target and then after the gunnery run and then zoom climb back up to altitude sound familiar the main mistake made by zero pilots was not the tail chaser attempted dogfight but again up into the resume climbed too quickly after a firing pass that gave allied pilots a chance to counterpunch and then thanks the lack of self-sealing fuel tanks and armor that simple mistake would often be a zero pilots last one thing i have to mention is the hamate eco me because it's gonna come up i don't it was an air combat maneuver that originated in japan in 1934 there's some implication in in in some literature that it was like some kind of foundational maneuver but really it was only a defensive counter move used to turn the tables on an opponent approaching from the rear and that's it it was a novel maneuver that worked exceptionally well if an opponent was baited into following the Japanese pilot into the initial loop but even if they didn't fall for the bait it acted as an evasive maneuver yeah the pilot apnea pilot didn't get satisfaction of fully turning the tables but they might live through that firing pass because really the enemy pilot had two choices you either followed them into the maneuver and then have a 0 on top of you or you allow the Japanese plane to evade and then you follow through in your attack and recover and try to attack again again the Haines ad call me was not as defensive it wasn't the be-all end-all of Japanese fighter tactics Nicholas Millman's description of the maneuver is the best I've seen and it is as follows quote the term Hina T Comey has been translated as turning in and involved turning the tables on a pursuer pursuing attacker by a sharp auto almost vertical climb to begin a loop and then near the top briefly applying right aileron and hard left rudder rudder to side slip out of the loop and snap real quickly and a twisting motion to put the zero behind above the attacking aircraft as it attempted follow-through yeah yep so well I mean that's a lot more detail on how zero dogfights then I've well then I've to be honest I've read anywhere well we obviously but most most of the time is in with I'm interested I'm really interested in how many zeros of a ship could carry its above sea level whatever it'll get down actually but it's very it's very useful because they're the the that's kind of basic oh yeah the Japanese always love to dogfight and every and the superior Allied aircraft could just speed fast them is is a very common trope but obviously is is far far from the truth now we mentioned within that the self-sealing fuel tank issue which or is the what one of if not the other major criticism of the zero along with lesser things like they're sometimes had weak armament the slow speed we've already talked about and but also overall fragility so we in terms of those kinds of criticisms how how true are some of them obviously we we've talked about the speed a bit but I guess well we'll explore them on there yeah for sure yeah well I'll go into a breakdown pretty much every major criticism every one of them has at least elements of truth to it as I think you'll often see in any kind of stereotype or or trope some have more truth than others but I guess we'll start with speed um so the Sailor was kind of middle of the pack when it came to speed for July 1940 and that it would remain there through its heyday in 1942 now that's the general gist a speed like any flight characteristic is relative so the a6m2 is faster than almost everything had fought in the pto through 1942 with only a couple of situational exceptions p39 at least from what I can piece together was a bit quicker Oh altitude and then the p40 was a bit quicker at intermediate altitude there's a lot of disagreement between sources regarding the actual speed of the a6m2 model 21 Richard Dunne actually is a freely available article on J aircraft digs into the question a lot the gist is that the a6m2 model 21 speed was decent it wasn't world beating sometimes you'll get the impression from documentaries or something because they constantly say fast no but it's misleading because it wasn't the fastest nor was it really slow it certainly was more than enough to deal with what it was engaging in the theater done ends up concluding that 555 kilometres an hour with overboost for short periods is probably correct and then critical altitude the that being the altitude that it actually reaches its maximum speed is also disputed most figures I've seen around are around 4,500 meters francillon another important reference work states that the maximum speed of the a6m2 model 21 was 533 kilometres an hour at four thousand five hundred and fifty meters again there's a lot of values out there anyone interested can check out Dunn's article the Japanese official top speed numbers were almost universally at nominal power so without overboost which leads to a lot of confusion when people look at documents and then throw in hat tests of captured aircraft that were underperforming to various degrees in some cases dramatically so and that's where you start to get numbers from all over the place as you could see discussion of even the simplest aircraft characteristics rapidly turns into a nightmare neppy endlessly scream about on the internet just as one case the there's a I think it's Intel bulletin number seventy five or something but where they test the Akutan zero and then they say for example that the zero was slower than the f4 F at sea level to which some Navy pilots relate that were actually fighting zeros in the wild so to speak we're like no yeah I've also add to this because it keeps coming up on the internet at the Sakai 1221 the engines for the most variants of a zero they did not have power loss with negative G maneuvers I have to bring this up because it does come up as a Japanese expert cheekily explained to me quote the Americans discovered the zeroes engine cut with negative G's by improperly repairing the Akutan zero so he explained actually and we can actually put up a diagram as well on on the video it was actually an intake control valve for the nakajima 100 Co float carburetor and then during 0 and negative G the normal inlet was closed to prevent the float chamber from being overflowed and then it would automatically open a restricted bypass which continued to allow a nominal amount of fuel in so there was no engine death like you would see for example in the mark 1 Spitfire that's why you'll never see Japanese accounts talking about negative G cuts in the 0 or any other aircraft equipped with Sakai engines and it's also why the Japanese like to maneuver in the vertical for example the hey Navy Co me which begins with a loop before inverting and then rolling out of it isn't exactly brilliant if your engine dies when you invert and the valve would be very simple thing for Allied mechanics to miss when they're repairing and maintaining an engine that without the help of any manuals and they've never really seen the engine itself either yeah so moving on to armament this is another one that there's truth and and exaggeration so really assist the 0 is in service for so long it kind of changes depending on when you look at it so 0 can be considered well-armed by the standard of mid 1940 it was armed with two 7.7 millimeter mgs synchronized through the prop and then to 20 millimeter cannon one in each wing similar armament and layout to the BF 109e three four that were the latest models in German service and keep in mind that there are still a lot of ones in front-line service which only had four rifle caliber machine guns and it's a similar story across I find people have this conception of like World War two aircraft as they were in 1944 where everyone has five hundred cannons and really in 1940 it's a it's a very different landscape as far as aircraft armament goes there isn't much to say about em jeez the MGS they're very similar to those factory I think licensed produced copies of the exact same model that were in the Spitfire hurricane of this period it was reliable it's synchronized well it did its job um I can mention actually the Japanese had an eight-year ound for it which I'm pretty sure that the only nation in World War two to have an eight-year owned for rifle caliber the cannons themselves were more interesting stories they were licensed produced Oerlikon ffs yes or licken the same cannon family that were used in the bf 109 ease and also later on probably more famously one that the US Navy and Royal Navy and everybody was sticking all over their ships yeah this family of orluk ins was actually the first among in the first cannon designed that were light enough to fit in aircraft and of course being first has its advantages and disadvantages the main advantage of being first is that first and the disadvantages are you were first so you haven't worked out all the problems Tech 99 1 which was used in a 6m - in a couple of the a6 m3 variants was the FF specifically there are three major criticisms associated with the Canon the first is it was low velocity which made it unpopular with pilots because in flexion shooting really difficult and the velocity of the cannon didn't match with the rifle caliber mg's in fact several sources I have state the bulk of a6m2 kills came from the and the rifle caliber mgs not the canons the second major criticism is the rate of fire was fairly low again making it hard to hit things and then the third was limited ammunition capacity only 60 rounds per gun so for a total of 120 rounds first point is fairly unique to the type 99 one because at a very short barrel length but low rate of fire and ammunition capacity were actually pretty common failings of early aircraft cannons across nations for example the mg FF or the e3 e4 they had 60 rounds per gun that has earlie Spanos 60 rounds per gun etc one major upside of the type 99 one was that it was extremely reliable as opposed to the early marks of the Hispanic for example which were plagued with stoppages in early versions and that was a problem that would persist into 1943 for the Spitfire fives used in the defense of Darwin the next major variant of the 0 the a6 m3 the model 32 increased the number of rounds per gun from 60 to 100 so we're already starting to address some of these criticisms I mean it would eventually end up as high as I think about 125 rounds per guns you're over doubling ammunition capacity over the course of the war from the a6 m3 a model 22 on type 99 2 cannon was introduced it was just longer barreled Orlick an FFL with a higher muzzle velocity and that addressed one of the main plates against the type 99 1 which was the muzzle velocity there's also a whole bunch of other small improvements we're not even gonna bother getting into that the zeroes armament would actually increase gradually through later variants which is probably a little bit lesser-known to people it's final versions would have to thirteen point two millimeter mg's which someone ironically were actually m2 Browning's chain in thirteen point two millimeter Hotchkiss of course the reason why they would pick Hotchkiss is that that they had a lot of that ammo was sitting around because of the Africa yeah and to 20 millimeter cannon again type 99 twos late marks of them so all told by the standard of mid nineteen forty the zero was on the heavier side of armament for fighters fast forward to December 1941 it's pretty pedestrian like middle of the road and then with continual upgrades the zero would stay kind of firmly in the middle of the pack when it came to offensive punch if you want to see what under-armed looks like take a look at the Japanese Army Air Service particularly the ki-43 one where they thought it was an amazing improvement to put in two heavy machineguns eventually over to your rifle caliber that's the one with the two rifle caliber yes hello probably yeah yeah yeah reach the lofty heights of two heavy machine guns that's synchronized terribly and had never-ending problems until they slowly work them out but that was yeah that's what underarm looks like perhaps the most interesting criticism you'll see is fragile structure well I probably most interesting when you when you look past armor and self-sealing fuel tanks yeah but allied wartime propaganda play up the alleged fragility of Japanese aircraft also German particularly the zero and often as a way to deflect as much criticism as possible from their own aircraft of course relatively early on the war they're not doing so hot and there's a lot of hysteria floating around about how terrible their planes are to deflect some of that they went well that their planes fall apart so understandable its wartime everybody was throwing around all sorts of hyperbole it was actually quietly dismissed in American intelligence circles after they started capturing Japanese aircraft studying them or they concluded their build quality was comparable with Western powers as long as they had the raw materials and labor to work with however some of this propaganda has stuck around to the present they and I've read otherwise excellent in serious histories that have given the the reader the impression the zero was practically ready to fall apart one book I claimed read claimed that the reason a higher horsepower engine wasn't fitted which is by the way factually wrong because it was reentrant iams was because the airframe would fall apart due to vibrations again that's a load of crap I have no idea where they even got that from reason more powerful engines weren't fitted more often and sooner was because the Japanese had difficulty developing high horsepower engines due to a lack of resources and then that was made even more difficult in the zeros case because again not because of the strength of the airframe but its size so you needed a high horsepower engine that was also small and that took well into the war for those two kinds of engines to start appearing in Japan this was exacerbated by overwork design teams under constant pressure from the Navy to just churn out new variants without taking the time to re-engineer area now yeah holy co she at least claims that it would have been possible to put something similar to the a6 m8 which is the final designed version of zero in a spring of 1943 if there had been a major push from the navy and aircraft manufacturers to actually slow down and meaningfully re engine i'm instead serious efforts at replacing the sake 21 wouldn't occur until it was painfully obvious to everyone and not just the aircraft designers that the added weight and improvements demanded that they need a bigger engine and that's kind of yeah take that with some salt it's just holy co she's claim yeah but you could at least see why we're kind of this misconception that they just couldn't reaction the zero even though they do eventually just wait late to matter yes anyway back to the zeros structure first elk erigor categorically say that the zero was modern all-metal monoplane fighter with stretched aluminium skin you think I wouldn't have to say that but as recently as last year I've seen people on ironically saying it was made of paper and wood and I really wish I was kidding yeah I've seen that a few times yeah as one fighter comparison work I have States the zero quote was supposed to fall apart in violent maneuvers or in a dive or when its wing cannon fired the zero were also supposed to disintegrate when hit by machine gun or cannon fire and now this next part is actually underlined in the work there is no truth whatsoever in any of these statements and quote um so let's dive a little deeper so Richard Dunne actually compared the skin thicknesses of the zero with early P 40 and they were in the same range on some parts of the P throat forty were thinner than the zero others were thicker but nothing that really mattered even the b-24 was has skin thickness in the same range as the zero it's stretched aluminium skin there's nothing to indicate the zero skin was that normally thin or weak and in the alloys used for the skin role so chemically saying um now let's start to get into things that actually matter so the a6m2 model 21 was designed and stressed up to seven G's normal positive load with eight point five g's is ultimate beyond eight point five g's that's when things start breaking its normal negative G load was three point five and ultimate was negative five point two so in other words the pilot was going to break before the plane would because for a pilot without a G suit even with breathing exercises your six G's is already sustaining 6 G's is already starting to push it for falling unconscious so there really wasn't much need to over engineer a plane too much beyond that at this point which is also why a military aviation history actually explained to me that yusuf planes were designed with the same 7 g normal load in mind yeah honey Co she actually goes into significant detail as far as weight reduction in short he relaxed the safety margins on specific components in order to save all the way he could and now this is where people stop and they go aha he he he made that light and therefore is gonna fall apart but what he but then he goes on to explain in details so originally he'd been designing planes with a 1.8 times margin for safety which would mean that every component would have to withstand up to 12 point 6 G's if a plane was supposed to be stressed up to 7 normal positive load which he rightly thought was just grossly inefficient don't actually adding any margin for safety because if you're pulling maneuvers in excess of 12 G's you have problems and your plane breaking yeah you're opposing the pilot of this and for what it's worth I've seen literally one example of a zero in a high-speed dive or ripping its wings off I think that was at Battle of Santa Cruz because a bunch of American pilots saw it happen and that's they're just literally one example I can find in fact I just recently I'm reading a book on Philippine pursuit pilots in the Philippines and there's already one example of a P for somebody mp40 doing the same thing so again it's it's there's no pattern there either so to compare the p40 see again was designed with 7 G loads and a slightly higher ultimate than the zero no night and day difference and certainly not one that actually mattered again whole eco she's weight reduction was absolutely ruthless and it's usually fragility is always tied to a reduction but honestly a lot of the weight reduction goes completely outside any matters of safety for one example he actually forced one of his a member of his team to redesign a tiny component to use aluminium instead of welded steel so they could save 75 grams and weight compared to the p40 see again of the zero zeros engine was lighter its propeller was lighter its landing gear struts for shorter and lighter because it had a smaller prop the tier the tires and brakes of the zero could be lighter because the plane was lighter overall the armament of the zero was later etc etc etc so there's it all additive and sometimes it even multiplies as in the case of tires and brakes because when you're making a hole lighter that toll system can be lighter so it's kind of a run-on effect Japanese metallurgy also helped significantly reduce the weight without compromising strength because in 1936 doctor Isamu Agassi of Sumitomo metal industry developed something called extra super duralumon ESD at the request of the naval air arsenal I'm Japan was actually the first country to develop it was an aluminium zinc magnesium alloy and the zero was the first plane to use it ESD had about 25 percent or tensile strength and 50% more yield strength than standard super duralumin for marginally less weight so ESD was used for the zeros main wing spar the heaviest part of the plane because it could sustain the loads that needed while also being smaller and lighter compared to a standard spar and it decreased the weight by about 30 kilograms which is very considerable the Allies would actually conduct chemical analysis on the zero and then develop their own similar alloys such as 75s later 7:07 five but they wouldn't start to use it until 1943 so that's seven years after the Japanese invented it it's kind of a rare case actually of the Japanese getting a technology one-up on yes so then where did so we've been talking about how the zero structure really isn't that fragile but then where disappears reputation as being a vulnerable fighter that's pretty borne out by the record well the part of part of that reason is that it is relatively small so there's less of it shoot up however the major reasons were lack of pilot and self armor self-sealing fuel tanks and yes we finally arrived like an hour and 40 minutes okay so here we go I'm gonna lay out a little bit of context first so I'm gonna I'm gonna blow some minds by explaining the Japanese aircraft of the mid to late 1930s lacking armor and self-sealing fuel tanks was not unique it was actually the opposite in fact that was the global standard the Soviets led the way in introducing some protection to their fighters from the mid 1930s but that was way ahead of the curve the Germans were the first to introduce protected fuel tanks and to their bombers I think from 37 if memory serves or 36 followed by actually the Japanese army air service which introduced rudimentary fuel tank protection on their meets abhishek e 21 bombers as a direct result of combat experience in china and they would do this before the Americans or British had actually added such protection to their own bombers a month the zero entered frontline service July 1940 the Luftwaffe started to consider putting armor plate in the BF 109 that would be gradually introduced through the rest of a year the zero would not have self sorry the bf 109 would not have self-sealing fuel tanks until after the Battle of Britain the Spitfire first received modest armor protection in May 1940 the priority went to the hurricane because the hurricane was fighting on the front line um and by Modest I mean just a thin armored headrest at this point I think was about five millimeters if memory serves I mean not so not even a full back plate and then rudimentary fuel tank protection was starting to roll out but it wasn't really self sealing and that was introduced from September 1940s so the same month the zero first claimed its air-to-air victories the US was actually behind the European powers particularly the Navy not surprisingly because they weren't fighting some protection would start trickling and designs from 1939 at a pretty slow pace from by December 1941 many of the American aircraft the Japanese would fight also lacked fuel tank and pilot protection the f4 f3 entered combat in the Pacific War with no armor and no fuel tank protection through the first few months of the war some boilerplate steel so not actual armor would be added to the Wildcats in the field and then retrofits adding a self-sealing fuel tanks would also occur gradually in the opening months of the war this caused a number of issues including drops and performance inaccurate fuel gauges self-sealing fuel tank failures etc however long story short the Wildcats would have self-sealing fuel tanks and armour installed and mostly working in time for their first confrontation with the zero at the Coral Sea in May 1942 so that's where you see oh there's all this preamble but then at the end of the day as far as zero versus wild cat is concerned the Wildcat protected zero not protected is wrecked the really important thing to understand is that self-sealing fuel tanks were not a yes/no toggle option like you'll see in some games like war thunder it was a new technology that would gradually evolve through the mid 1930s and into the war itself on some designs failed for multitude of reasons mistakes would be made in handling and installation some early attempts at designing protected tanks proved ineffective because the material was too thin or was the wrong composition etc etc also self-sealing fuel tanks and armor didn't come for free they weighed a lot and in the case of self-sealing fuel tanks that also tended to reduce fuel capacity so of course that led to a drop in performance and range tended to be the biggest loser with all that context out we can finally get to the 0 so as Richard Dunne notes and he's written the only detailed history of aircraft protection in existence isn't accurate to say holy co she sacrificed armor and filled tank protection because that implied that they were in existence to sacrifice in the first place when the specification was laid out in 1937 they they had no prior history of doing that and the zero lacking such features in 1940 was not out of the ordinary as I've Illustrated nor was it unheard of through 1941 and in the case of the pto into 1942 however from mid-1942 onward the Japanese Navy Air Service became increasingly unique in its party adoption of protection features and again no time specifying the Navy here the Army Air Service already was the process of adding protection features to their aircraft by the end of 1943 would generally have comparable protection to their Western counterparts but the Navy only took baby steps during the like 4 through 41 42 43 the h8 K flying Oh Ted good protection the g 4m started to receive very rudimentary protection through 1943 the j 1n also had decent protection but beyond that all other Navy aircraft were unprotected there was a reluctance to add protection to the 0 through 1942 43 and that was likely due to a combination of factors zero is performing well in combat anyway so why screw with formula that was working but perhaps most importantly they didn't want any manger range drops through 1942 and early 1943 the model 32 the a6 m3 which honestly was a far better plane than its reputation he was panned by Japanese pilots because it lacked the ranged depth some of the operations that they were currently engaged in so the thought of adding self-sealing fuel tanks that would drop it further was probably just not gonna lie no pun intended the 0 finally started to get protection in late 1943 with the e6 m5 the model 52 that's when it got automatic wing tank fire extinguishers and the fire extinguishers could put out one fire if the tanks lit up and then the tanks themselves were not self-sealing and then the following protection features were additive to the zeros design um so a 6 M 5 beam in 1944 received 45 millimeter bulletproof windscreen a6m5 C which also by the way this is the variant of the zero that finally weight awoke the Navy up to maybe we need to re-engining so much to it it received a piece of 40 55 millimeter bulletproof glass for the rear of the seat pilot's head and an 8 millimeter armored plate for the seat rear for those unfamiliar with aircraft protection 8 millimeters is a decent amount now the question marks set in because it's late war Japan and Thank You big thank you to Kaz actually we has a lot of documentation and also can read Japanese helping me out on this so self-sealing fuselage tanks were scheduled to be adopted at the a6m5 sea possibly they were definitely adopted by the a6 m6 which is the model 53 by the way we're in to 1945 now this is now the sealing field self sealing wing tanks were scheduled to be adopted on the a6m5 sea and then he doesn't even know when and zero actually got them but the gist is that the zero got protection too late to matter by the time the Allies finally heard partner suddenly by the time the zero finally provided some protection the air war had swung decisively in favor of the Allies what's this like by the time you're writing protection to an aircraft in 1945 video Japan you probably think things to worry about yes exactly so how important was the lack of protection that can be debated to the end of time I personally think it was very significant when you look at the nature of a lot of the kills against zeros which we snap shots as the Japanese pilots pulled into their zoom climbs too quickly it's entirely reasonable to think that with this armored and fuel tank protection farm orbs Japanese pilots would have made it home after making that mistake however the counterpoint to that is the impact on the aircraft's performance if the early variants of the zero had protection would the resulting drop in performance have more than offset the benefit of having the protection in first place so for example the best protected aircraft over New Guinea in 1942 was the p39 400 but that had the highest loss rates whereas the least protected the zero had the lowest again the counterpoint to that counter point is when the zero was shot down it was almost certain that the pilot died along with it whereas quite a few p39 four hundred pilots their planes would get shot up but then they bail out and we have to fight another day so there's there's no simple answers there but there's a lot of moving parts to the question yeah one criticism that I'm actually going to talk about a little because I think it's really important but it gets less coverage than others is the lack of reliable radios there was a lack of reliable of radio communications in the zero through nineteen forty two forty three and I'll get the most straightforward part out of the way first so carrier based zeros all of them had radios simply out of necessity however pilots didn't like to rely on them and the lack of reliable radios undermined Japanese fleet defense understandably since it was difficult in a times impossible to communicate with the zeros that were already aloft the cap was largely left to its own devices with only rudimentary direction from the fleet below like a screening ship would see an incoming attack and they fire their guns or they'd shoot off a flare or destroyers would lay smoke as an indicator to the cap that something was coming for the most part the combat air patrol had to self spot and then organically respond to threats that approached the fleet that worked well sometimes but it failed disastrously at others most famously at Midway in 1942 often you'll see in the narrative where people just kind of skip over this they they say oh because of VT six VT eight all the zeros were low that's actually not case I mean it they were low in getting shot up there but really screwed over the Japanese cap wasn't altitude because that narrative implies that the zeros were climbing back up to altitude they just couldn't get there for the dive bombers what ended up happening is just extreme target fixation there were 42 zeroes aloft at the moment of the decisive attack like 10 20 and from what we can discern moat the vast majority if not all 42 zeroes we're currently attacking VF 3 so thatches unit and VT 3 that specific torpedo bomber formation all 42 zeroes in one tiny little area attacking two targets and they were pretty much the they were seemingly blind to any other threat and that's very significant and and the failure in radio communications is definitely a factor in that dimension the probably getting each in each other's way with that kind yeah it was grossly inefficient for example thatch he describes and he put the number at about 15 to 20 zeros I would put it in the range of two to tie which seems actually reasonable that we're forming up of him in Linus turned to literally take turns firing firing passes and as partial and Tully note and shattered sword yeah that it was grossly inefficient you had the entire cap on one focused on two targets the entire are the rest of the fleet is completely unprotected by by zeros I mean on paper the Japanese had like a sector system where a certain Xero's from a certain carrier supposed to protect a certain part of the fleet of course what ended up happening in reality is they're flying around and then they see that other zeros have found something to shoot up and I like let's go over there and help them shoot that thing up I'm so it kind of organically flowed around the fleet and it worked okay for attacks on single vectors but the second you had things turn up for multiple directions you get Midway yeah anyway so lack of communication some are sorry many land-based zeroes that operated in the South Pacific a lundström actually claims all of them and I think there's a lot of evidence to support that because any pretty much any photo you see of a land-based zero they don't have the radio and they remove their radios outright just to save weight because they were deemed useless and lack of communications severely limited tactical control options that could be exercised by flight commanders that was particularly the case over Guadalcanal because there was a significant amount of cloud build-up over the Solomons see that degraded of visibility significantly when there are cases where two groups of zeros would be flying along there'd be a cloud between them one group would be start getting attacked by the Americans and really needed help the other group even though on paper the Japanese outnumbered the Americans and the in the engagement which is kind of fly on blissfully unaware that the other set of zeros was getting attacked because there was no way to radio in fact really I'd say the fact that Japanese zero pilots performed as well as they did without basic radio communications this is pretty impressive but it's undeniably a major issue so with that part of the question another way why were the radio is a problem in the first place one part of that question falls squarely in the lap of the Japanese the other part was beyond their control so the radio in the a6m2 the model 21 was actually designed well designed and built however the installation was not properly grounded or shielded against electrical interference from the engine particularly the poor shielding of the zeros dual ignition system caused severe interference and that static charges generated by the airframe as it moved through the atmosphere made things worse and there are a few technical personnel available in the South Pacific that knew enough about radios that they could identify the problems and fix them so would that led to the simple solution of just ripping systems out of the planes which kind of begs the question of if they were being outright removed in the South Pacific why weren't complaints about the radios that bad early on um it was always present but they weren't taking the radios out um and this is where I actually have to defer to Trent valenko who really knows stuff about this he graciously supplied me with a giant pile of sources he has all the receipts for this and he gave me the gist because I'm not even gonna pretend to understand everything he sent me so the first point is that during the period of fighting on the South Pacific it was during a solar minimum which was worse for static with high-frequency transmission bands the second major point was the Earth's local magnetic field in Rabaul Guadalcanal New Guinea Feder played havoc with a high-frequency radio in short it was the worst theatre fought in World War two for high frequency radio static so the maximum voice radio range of a P 39 F 4 F over Guadalcanal was roughly 80 kilometers when you look at numbers for example the Luftwaffe in Europe or the Mediterranean it was over double that and it wasn't because they were using secret Wunderwaffe radios it was because they were fighting in an area where there was less high frequency radio static um and there were a lot of examples actually of the Allies dealing with radio reception issues during the campaigns in the South Pacific like for example the ones that always come to mind for me are actually very significant sighting reports of Japanese fleets that never actually reached American commanders and it's very likely that this high frequency radio static was a factor there were so there were problems for the Allies but it was a disaster for the Japanese when terrible natural conditions in the theater were combined with the poor shielding in their radios all a Rabaul based Japanese zero pilot was gonna get his just varying degrees of static unless he closed it was really close to a powerful ground-based transmitter which so that you now you can see why in this specific theater at the specific time the zero pilots were just ripping the system's out of their planes yeah the Japanese eventually actually improved the shielding of their radios in the latter part of the war but it would remain a problem through 1943 so again similar story I guess to self-sealing fuel tanks is they're fixing these problems when it's too late situation yeah I mean it's that that's a very interesting set of information because we on the one hand it's like if you think people think about the technology involved in world war ii and that's certainly certainly for me that's the first time i come across the idea that astrophysics play significantly when you're talking about magnetic fields and solar minimums and maximums Eero pilot over the air baby I suppose that also actually again sort of coming from the warship side of things that in possibly informs that I might have to take a further look into that because obviously we you get things like during the in that sector you have the obviously historical disaster that was the Abda command yeah but in that whole campaign and even into some of the actions in the Indian Ocean later on when they're all and they've you got involved in in a bigger way there were a lot of issues with communications between fleets and historically some of that has been written off as language barriers or resentment of another nationalities being in command but there were a lot of instance logged where signals were unclear or just flat-out not received and having to be read so people out of communication having to pull in call into ports which obviously have more powerful radio transmitters and they're having to daisy-chain reports to other areas that are close enough to communicate with ships that they've become separated from so potentially that so that's another aspect I could look into you fool yeah it's it's actually really interesting yeah it'd never occurred to me before Trent actually explained it to me and he provided all this documentation why we could actually put up is just an image of an episode I think I've done a survey by I think an Australian University or something mm-hm or post four they sorted out all the high frequency rate uh static and then you just see this like horrible zone like right over New Guinea and global canal and everywhere everywhere the the zeroes were fighting where they were cleaning chronically about their useless radios I'm like oh okay and I suppose once you've taken your radio out even if you move to an area where there isn't so much interference you're not gonna know because you don't look over the radio exactly I think there's something more to be explored there is even if in another theatre you would technically the radio would be more functional I mean still problems because of the poor shielding but yeah a trust is broken where you kind of see dismissively in in Japanese recollections particularly a Sakai Sabra or he's like yeah we just ripped those things out because we saved 18 kilograms and weight and we'd rather have that than open the radios yeah but yeah that's an interesting point yeah so so with all that in mind obviously as you say there's the Lehrer land-based zeroes but the zeroes are also coming across land-based fighters as they go into the war so how does it compare to those because obviously it's a carrier fighter we've been talking a lot out facing for us the F or F but what about the land-based stuff that it would run into yeah so I'll add a little bit of context again like I think my last name is gonna be context doing that lock so for example flying the extreme long ranges from revolt well canal it makes maximum limits of even the zeros range and then they were bounced from above by f4 f4 s flown by pilots skilled and deflection shooting and the Allies had an elaborate and highly capable early warning system all of these factors gave the zeros far more problems than the land-based aviation they encountered in New Guinea and over Darwin never mind that zeros also had very limited fighting time over Guadalcanal and had to engage Americans often with their drop tanks still attached we actually look at the Guadalcanal campaign it's kind of all of the problems that the Luftwaffe had in the Battle of Britain but worse like it just the ranges are longer the early warning is longer it's it's just a nightmare when you compare that to the New Guinea campaign for example the p39 one thing I should notice that the f4f actually maintained its performance better at altitude than the p40 and the p39 400 which was significant because a lot of the time the zeroes were escorting bombers at reasonably high altitudes usually higher than twenty thousand feet or six thousand meters so as one example in 1942 New Guinea 44 P 39 s were lost in combat compared to 15 zeroes that's a kill ratio if you want to keep kill ratios of three to one in favour of the Japanese if these numbers seem load to people again kill claims both sides over claims significantly err Cobras were credited with ninety five zero kills that's a claim to kill ratio of about six point three to one Japanese over claims were also similar so they had claims into the hundreds again there's a multitude of factors behind why the Japanese did as well as they did of which technical aspects were only one in this case the p39 s since they're out performance at altitude fell off so significantly they were just fighting in engagements that they were constantly at a disadvantage this would get better in the war when allies started introducing stuff like the p38 that was better at high altitudes because the zero is then lost that altitude range that they could go run to so up high they have problems with p-38s down low they're dealing with B 39s and that's where you can get some of that detail there so zeroes also didn't have too much difficulty dealing with P forties of various variants though keep in mind that doesn't mean it was one-sided beyond the initial engagements in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies where again there was a lot of context behind beyond just aircraft technical characteristics that were lending into very one-sided kill ratios for the 0a p forties in the Philippines for example were crippled by perlier poor early warning I'm actually just reading in detail the chapter on a very good book on that where yeah they scramble all the p40 is very early and they're all flying around to all these phantom threats and they're all a lot of fuel they land and then the zeros turn up an early-warning was just critical for allies allied fighters through 1941-42 because they climbed really badly that meant that they just if they didn't have the warning they would be stuck low and slow well very angry Japanese just bounced them from above with impunity with that early warning it gains kind of equal footing or in the case of something like Guadalcanal a pretty decisive advantage where they would just they would just buzz in at extremely high speed shoot up a bunch of bombers and they dive past and just be gone and the zeroes couldn't do anything about it one many of the relative strengths and weaknesses of the zero just kind of carry over to comparisons with the land-based aircraft with a couple of exceptions the performance the p39 400 fell off significantly at higher altitudes but then at lower altitudes it was much more comparable to the to the zero the p40 very various variants was faster than the a6m2 at low and medium altitudes but again performance started to fall off at higher altitudes where the initiative went over to the 0 the 0 had decisive advantages and climb range acceleration and low speed maneuverability the Americans or American planes were more durable had better dive performance I'll take a brief moment to mention the AVG the American volunteer group famously known as the Flying Tigers because there's a lot of misconceptions out there around them the AVG performed very well and frankly embarrassed the Japanese Army Air Service in Burma but it never fought zeroes the flying tigers constantly stated they did but that was just due to simple misidentification of Japanese army air service nakajima ki-43 and ki-44 x' those were a completely different aircraft from the zero and we're also completely different from each other I have to bring this up because there's just a lot of literature that they look at those flying tigers reports saying shut down zero engage zero etc etc and they just say oh while they were fighting zeroes and it stems from the unit itself habitually misidentifying every single Japanese single-engine fighter with a retractable landing gear it's a zero and it's not limited to them either phantom zeros pop up in all sorts of allied records I kind of think of it as the tiger tank of the Far East just like how the Allies tiger and every single armored engagement in Europe there was a zero in every dogfight stasia now the part of them one of most interesting cases is engaging the Spitfire mark 5 over Darwin because you of generally-speaking year when you think zero one of the last aircraft you would think as an adversary is the Spitfire I mean it it provides such a great example of conflicts so if you look at the results with just divorce from context like you would see on an inner like a forum 38 Spitfires were destroyed over the duration of the campaign for the loss of five zeros and one ki-43 there may the zero losses may have been slightly higher if you include zeros that returned and then the airframes were written off but still it's pretty pretty one-sided however there's a bajillion different reasons for this so the first is the the Spitfire mark 5 struggled with a lot of engine reliability issues and then systemic 20-millimeter hispano failures that badly undermined their combat effectiveness and it would only take 120-millimeter hispano to fail and you wouldn't have any canons because if you fired the other one it would yaw the aircraft so badly that you couldn't aim accurately the Japanese this another point is the Japanese fighter unit in this case the two hundred and second coped I formally I picked the twelfth coca tie which was the unit that first got zeros he took part in this campaign and they were way more experienced than their RAAF opponents and consistently used better tactics in teamwork third the objective of the Spitfire mark fives was not to duel with zeros but to shoot down bombers and when you factor in Japanese bomber and recon aircraft losses the law the kill ratio actually evens out to about one to one with of course aircrew losses Japanese losing far more yeah cuz having more people on board yep and then fourth early early warning in place in defense of Darwin was less robust than that provided for Henderson Field on Guadalcanal and then fifth due to various mechanical issues and range limitations many Spitfires were lost to other things not zeros direct there's one instance I think where five Spitfires end up being destroyed and it's not because the series shot the down is because the zeros escorted an attack and then they started escorting back by the way the round one way that was about over 500 500 miles Spitfires chased them for a while only to realize that they were gonna run out of fuel and then they ended up ditching so that's the super short story but that's my context is so important because without it you have this really juicy sounding number that you throw in the faces of patriotic British and Australian people well look how much the Spitfire sucks Australians can't fly blah blah blah but then when you put it in context you start to understand what a real air campaign looks like yeah there's a whole bunch of factors and really quick the a6m2 model 21 had better low speed maneuverability than the spin from error mark 5 as did the a6 m3 model 32 which was less maneuverable than the model 21 there's actually compares a detailed comparison with a model 32 in a Spitfire mark 5 where they in detail evaluated the 2 of them the Australians specifically mm-hmm they found that it could also turn the Spitfire however the Spitfire mark 5 had superior performance above 6000 years below that things started to even out a little bit more but the Spitfire still had the edge on paper Spitfire is faster no surprise there at all better rate of climb was actually pretty close and the Spitfire of course had better protection and the 0 had better accelerations lighter and way better range so in that case again you look at those just the technical characteristics between the two and you're like well the Spitfire should come out pretty well then you look at the results and it's a one-sided thing for the 0 I know when you play back in context you see why you get the results that you there's an awful lot of factors just beyond the as you say kind of thought that the computer game kind of well this aircraft has this spec this aircraft has this spec but put two people who have probably never come in close to a cockpit in their life or nice and is oh yes I'm wondrously the mathematics wins but factors are different when you actually have to fly yeah yeah ok so obviously we've talked about strengths weaknesses how it performed against various opposition mainly in its heyday in 42 so what point did the ACM start to become surpassed by its opposition and in that vein was there a plan successor to the a6m beyond upgrading constantly and if so when did that come into service yeah so I would argue there wasn't an exact point in time when it was surpassed I guess you could pick a symbolic date like combat debut of the xf6 F but I don't think it's that useful it was kind of a gradual process as a newer Allied fighters both land-based and carrier base began to see service in the PTO in numbers so some examples of course the Hellcat for you P 38:37 p-51 all various variants Spitfire mark 9 etc the p38 started to trickle into the pto through mid 1942 that's real impact wouldn't start to be felt until 1943 others started to appear at different times through 1943 and as late as 1944 in the case of the Spitfire mark 9 so broadly speaking the zero was starting to be eclipsed by mid-1943 and I would say it was fully eclipsed by the end of that year by the latest aircraft in theater mmm-hmm as far as the zeroes replacement goes the Japanese started to think about it right in 1940 not surprising they're given how the a5m a6m transition worked they issued this 16 she's specification however remember all those systemic problems that I alluded earlier alluded to earlier in the chat they didn't [ __ ] the zeroes development that they kneecap what would become the meets EVGA 7em a violent wind or at MIT faceplant just right out of the gate because of a shortage that isn't mentioned as often as others and that's a lack of design staff put simply Mitsubishi just had too much on its plate they literally didn't have the people available to start design work on the e7m at that point holy co she was preoccupied with improved variants of the zero on a meet CB she j2m Braden was in the works the company as a whole is doing all sorts of stuff so they shelved the specifications another factor was they judged that a small high horsepower engine that would have been needed to fulfill the specifications was not yet practically available so they just shelved it project was revived in April 1942 under new specifications as per pretty pretty typical design cycle they anticipated it would take three years for the aircraft to reach operational units and I bet the key mathematicians among you can start to see the problem here yeah so the a7m ones prototype made its first flight and 6th of May 1944 the engine in it was underpowered it delivered performance way below the Navy specifications in fact top speed ended up being about the same as the a6m5 with worse climb rates and it was just canceled in August 1944 on its own mitsubishi mated the e7 m1 prototype to a new engine as just a test plane and it ended up performing very well and only missed the specifications by a small amount I mean the Navy adopted it into 1945 so overall 8 a7 m1 prototypes were completed seven were converted to a 7m 2's with at least three finishing that conversion each prototype was wrecked or damaged by the end of the war they had a nasty tendency of getting straight flashy what's aircraft except for one of apparently uncertain status it just disappeared somewhere maybe someone has an 87 m in their garage mass production unit number one was almost completed by the end of the war but then it was unceremoniously off the port of Naga immediately at the end of the war now two other single-engine fighters were put into service by the Japanese Navy Air Service during the war and saw combat they weren't replacements for the zero the hint is in the short designations j2m and Kawanishi n1 k1j or 2g j was the short designation for land-based fighter they were not carrier fighters there was apparently one prototype of an n1 k for a produced again in 1945 i don't know there's basically nothing in English and I'm not a big prototype guy and it's 1945 so who cares yeah as a side note the reason why the n1 k 2j for example wasn't the j-3 k2 is because the design started life as a seaplane fighter which is n designation and then redesigned as a land-based fighter so the Japanese stuck the J on the end after a - that's also why this the seaplane 0 was a 6 m2 - m4 seaplane fighter ok effectively the Japanese Navy was it was what at first equipped with and then later gets stuck with the a6 M as a carrier fighter pretty much the entire war and even even if the a7 7 M in some hypothetical scenario had entered service I think it wouldn't have fit on most of their carriers like I don't think the UH new class actually could fit it yeah tae ho could but that didn't uh ok so I mean that that's the aircraft itself but one obviously in the Pacific War there is also the issue of the pilots as well as we've discussed a Shi pilot training makes a huge difference so how much did the loss of the key to boot i's skilled pilot corps affect the perception of the zeros as the war progressed because obviously it's the same or slightly upgraded aircraft but perhaps with significantly less skilled pilots even as the Allied advantages in aircraft technology and water makes parents begin to grow mm-hmm yes excellent question so uniquely among the world's navies the the Japanese Navy Air Service actually had more land-based air unit than carrier-based right into the asia-pacific war that's why they took up the bulk of the fight against China from 1937 to 41 I became Japan's de facto Air Service when it came to strategic bombing operations and it also spearheaded most of the air operations in China until the middle of 1941 I imagined to the eternal frustration and embarrassment of the Japanese army in December 1941 the Japanese Navy Air Service had 37 land-based air groups and then 10 carriers with their air compliments on that's including hosho so roughly 3,500 aircrew overall first I'll stress that the Japanese Navy Air Service was ground down through attrition over the course of all the combat operations conducted in the first couple years of the war there was no single moment that Japan lost their trained air crews it was common for example to claim that Japan lost quote most of its trained air crews and quote at the at the Battle of Midway in 1942 however they lost only a hundred and twenty-one aircrew in that disaster and within that only 36 of those were as a direct result of the carrier's being bombed it's significant but hardly back-breaking for some contrast the Japanese lost about a hundred and forty five aircraft crew at the Battle of Santa Cruz which they won so you can see kind of the the attritional nature already taking on its own one so there there was no one dramatic moment or even couple of moments that just deprived the Japanese Navy air service of its air crews it was drawn-out process every air crewmen that was killed from the start of the war through 1944 gradually degraded combat effectiveness the impact of aircrew losses was virtually imperceptible of first but would become more and more evident into 1943 I mean you can see Japanese accounts of newer pilots coming in that are just worse and worse and worse and American pilot perceptions where they they start out in they're saying like you zero pilots they really know what they're doing they're aggressive they're tough but now as of late we're noticing amongst the good ones there's not so good ones yeah starting to filter in the most significant turn of events was what John Marshall has called a quote twin headed monster and that being that the air campaigns in New Guinea and the Solomons now these Titanic struggles would stretched out over a year led the Japanese Navy Air Service white and not just the carrier based units but the land-based ones as well there was the one side was not dramatically superior to the other in the air war over the South Pacific in 1942 and into 1943 this was a slugfest the aircraft losses on in combat on both sides were high they work out to being relatively even aircraft losses outside of that were higher still particularly for the Japanese given their generally poor logistics aircrew losses were also higher for the Japanese due to a whole number of factors less resources to recover downed Airmen and yes they did try to recover downed Airmen it's just they had a fraction of the resources dedicated to it mm-hmm general lack of armor and self-sealing fuel tanks so you get shot up into zero chances are you are also being shot up or fewer places to land damaged aircraft not only intermediate airfields which Japanese were very slow at building but also they had a 10 they also had a tendency to piss off the local native population which would then take out their frustrations on japanese airman whereas they would generally be relatively helpful to Allied air crew and then the Japanese are also fighting offensively for a large part of the early campaigns which means they're operating way way far away from unfriendly forces wild cat gets shot down over Henderson field he parachutes down and there's US Navy ships and there's Marines everywhere and chances are he'll hopefully make it back Japanese pilot gets shot gets shot up over a ball and then it's you know 560 miles back to Rabaul mm I made a damaged aircraft chances are they're not making it back and you're not gonna find anywhere safe to land and fight another day and also there was a tendency though not a universal one to forego parachutes we know it was common within the Tainan Coco tais specifically even though higher echelon of the Japanese Navy air service they were constantly telling the pilots to wear parachutes but the pilots themselves would forego them and this was also common among bomber crews which get talked about of course less often than fighter crews but their loss through attrition is also very significant I often see kind of this basic concept of people on forums or wherever else where they think that the course of the air air war was like flipping a switch or one day the you happen EES were slaughtering the Allies and then the next day the Allies were slaughtering the Japanese because new planes or something like that now the reality is more complex I I like to think of it as two sides kind of walk up to each other in the South Pacific and then they take turns just punching each other in the face over and over again and the Japanese fall over yeah yeah they traded blow for blow but the Allies could replace their losses and actually build up their air strength whereas the Japanese would only grow weaker I mean it's a similar story with the Japanese Navy as well with all that context laid out well I guess I'll answer the question so did the loss of the majority of experienced AV fighter pilots impact allied perceptions of the zero certainly the a6m5 in its various forms was not totally incomparable to an f6 F particularly at low intermediate to low altitudes yeah the Essex F was new clean sheet design he was clearly superior but there was a lot more going on than just that the f6f wasn't a super fighter but it racked up the kill account of one the air war and the Pacific shifted from this relatively even slugfest through 1943 and then transitioned into 1944 into really what can only be described as a one-sided slaughter that purely looking at aircraft technical characteristics does not explain mmm-hmm and it was a combination of everything the zero was clearly past its best before date by the end of 1943 but more importantly the average Japanese Navy pilot had declined significantly in quality they were increasingly forced to fight outnumbered as the Allies had the luxury of massing their attacks while Japanese had to defend everywhere with ever dwindling resources so imagine you're a Japanese pilot you have less than a hundred flight hours if you're land-based a hundred a lofty 150 if your carrier aviator which is barely enough to know how to fly a plane much less fight in one or in the case of carrier aviators how to land on a carrier ozawa when he was trying to rebuild his air groups before the Battle of the Philippine Sea was quite vivid and just watching Harrier II readers come in and just crashed the planes and then you're thrust into combat against a superior aircraft flown by better pilots and you're outnumbered so and then of course there's a whole bunch of other factors increasing efficiency of Japanese army American radar vectoring of combat air patrol etc etc it was just a bad time by the time the Japanese tried to mask their air power and the Marianas you've got famous slaughter that became known as the great Marianas turkey shoot and that was both land-based and carrier based aviation the Japanese operational plan was relatively sound I mean it was about as good as they could probably come up with ozawa arguably won the duel between the Admirals but it didn't matter the the Japanese were thrusting with a broken spear as I just described it you know American pilots reported during the Battle of the Philippine Sea that for the most part Japanese fighters were timid and at times just downright avoided seeking out combat against their American counterparts on that left dive a torpedo bombers with little to no protection and they were savaged and when the Japanese fighters were engaged they didn't do any better and you just see this constant downward spiral toward the end of the war yeah it's there is a very interesting way of laying it out I think because you're busy so there is this conception that kind of a nothing I even I've fallen victim to a few times a Midway some being promoted as kind of well this is the turning point after this is it's Easy Street and yeah it's actually not yeah yeah it's an excellent point to make because kind of that the perception of let's say someone that's moderately informed about the Asia Pacific or or the Pacific more specifically is kind of like Pearl Harbor and then indistinct muttering and then Midway and then indistinct muttering and then Philippine Sea Leyte Gulf nukes yeah yeah so it kind of gets this perception of all they hate us at Pearl Harbor and then we just have all these sweeping victories and then whereas there's particularly between Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Philippine Sea they had to kill a lot of Japanese aircrew I think a lot of Japanese ships to degrade capability to the point that you you kind of see the last whimpers of conventional Japanese air power yeah yeah I suppose the yeah of SIBO Lexington is sunk at Coral Sea and Yorktown obviously at Midway but then I suppose people tend maybe forget the Hornet which is the last and the and actually and a slightly upgraded version of the Yorktown's gets since the bottom almost half a year later at Santa Cruz which is not not something that a quito butai who supposedly been completely crippled by Midway is going to be capable of doing yeah exactly the center cruises the last great gasp of the remaining core of the Japanese naval he carrier aviators that had really started the war in fact um oh what's his name move out she gave she jihad oh um he was the torpedo commander and also the leader of the attack wave at Santa Cruz he's the one that led the attack that sank Hornet and it's kind of fitting as lundström actually details because he was kind of guarded as probably the leading expert on aerial torpedo warfare in the world um and also one of the best carrier aviators and he dies in the attack that sinks Hornets so it's kind of a fitting end to him but also it's it's kind of symbolic of really the last gasp of the Japanese carrier aviators another interesting anecdote from that engagement is of course that's the first time the Japanese carrier aviators are really coming starting to come to grips with exponentially increasing US Navy anti-aircraft yes where there's one anecdote where one of the few survivors that come back from one of those attacks is almost speechless I'm at the amount of crap that was being thrown at them they had like no preparation mentally for for the increased volume of a a fire yeah so so I much as I haven't seen your Twitter feed as her about the reason moving but as I hesitate to bring it up but as a sort of a shorthand reference the level of a a fire that's perhaps portrayed by Hollywood more recently is probably better ascribed to that battle than is a Midway yeah it's um as partial and Tully actually pointed out this is a slight tangent but it's interesting um Japanese the the fleet the primary their primary doctrine for defense against air attack was helm of to maneuver um whereas with the US Navy it was more leaned towards massing a a fire and then maneuvering for specific threats and in 1942 by Midway at least there's no clear answer to that question both the kind of work about as well but there's a very clear answer even by I 4:42 it's very clear that the us way of doing it is the way to go yeah whereas the Japanese they just never got the AAA that they need as the type 96 was a pile of [ __ ] yeah that's what that's putting it kindly so with all that in in in mind where does the a6m zero sit accurately in the context of carrier-based aircraft in the Pacific War yeah so I think the zero rightly it's Japan's most famous combat aircraft it deserves its place among the most famous aircraft of the Second World War generally um it was an impressive technical achievement when it entered service and it was fully competitive with its contemporaries and had an outstanding combat record and it was not just outstanding as a carrier fighter but as a land-based one as well roughly ten thousand zeros of all variants were produced making it Japan's most numerous fighter that all being said I don't think the zero should be remembered as some kind of mythical super fighter one always must place a piece of equipment in its operational and doctrinal context the Japanese Navy Air Service were world leaders in conducting high intensity air operations over extreme ranges from 1940 to 42 and the zero was the absolute perfect fighter to conduct them no other Air Force in the world at the time could have done what the Japanese Navy Air Service accomplished in 41 42 as far as far as expecting air power up to very long ranges the fact that the Japanese Navy was able to contest the air over Guadalcanal at all from their base at Rabaul was mind blowing in and of itself now that's a round trip of nine hundred and something miles can't remember at the time I had a 981 I want to say ridiculous range and they're just they and it's like a no big no big deal Oh we'll just we'll fly all the way to Rabaul or all the way to go to Henderson field rather and dogfight over it then fly back I was like an 8 I could a tower trip mission um the zero fared well against every Allied fighter at through 1943 but I didn't mean it was one-sided I'm and that's one thing I really want to emphasize is that zero didn't just slaughter everything and encountered it particularly the Wildcat which is often kind of the butt of jokes its maligned in documentaries but really when you look at it it was able to compete with the zero with with in context with those pilots and everything on relatively even firms and the numbers reflect that in fact in many instances the Wildcat comes off very well and honestly it performed very very well when you look outside of just fighter versus fighter for example over Guadalcanal when you start taking g4m bomber losses and took held yeah four F comes off very well zero would serve from some summer 1940 all the way through to Japan's surrender it served as a carrier fighter a land-based fighter a seaplane fighter an interceptor an escort fighter a night fighter a fighter bomber a tack on cause a final zero variant which was the design which was the a6 m8 the model 64 was set to enter production at war's end um it's often been said that the last variant of the zero had not changed much from the first but honestly that doesn't hold too much water I won't get into insane detail here but the zero had moved far away from its original design concept and I'll just lay out some general trends um and with the caveat that there are certain models that deviated from the main line and then take out on the 6ma with some salt so loaded weighted increased by 700 40 kilograms actually so quite hefty I mean the weight went into a multitude of improvements that saw the wing loading increase that's one indicator for most speed maneuverability but it exchanged that maneuverability for other performance dive performance increased through the variants as did rate of climb altitude performance was improved and top speed increased though not as much as one would think for the most part and increased engine power largely offset added weights and improvements the wings were shortened which is one factor for increased dive performance the ailerons were also shrunk which allowed for a higher roll rate at higher speeds and improved the zero as a gunnery platform at higher speeds one of the main criticisms as detailed earlier firepower improved first by adding additional ammo for the 20 millimeters then introducing higher velocity cannon and then complementing and eventually replacing the rifle caliber MGS with thirteen point two millimeter heavy machineguns protection of course also radically improved from none to eventually having armor bullet resistant windscreens armor automatic fire extinguishers than self-sealing fuel tanks extreme range which was a main feature of the a6m2 model 21 was gradually sacrificed again with the exception of v6 m3 model 22 which was I won't get into it but it's kind of like a we hot duckling the range on any variant of the zero can't be considered anything resembling bad but it did drop significantly from its lofty heights of course range mattering far less for the Japanese in the latter part of the war when to be frank they didn't need to travel too far bakery Americans coming to kill them as stated before the zero was past its prime by 1943 and it kind of became somewhat emblematic of Imperial Japan's failure to win the war quickly its rise and fall roughly outlined Imperial Japan's fortunes in the Asia Pacific war as a whole and I guess with that I'll end I'll just again think Trent elenco military aviation history and calves for providing me with sources and feedback on parts of my notes all right well thank you very much I mean that's it's probably gonna be one of if not the longest video on the channel so far which is somewhat ironic considering it so it was all about a plane that was stuck on a warship and not work ship itself but there you go I mean it's as we've said it is pretty much it's a central aspect of the Pacific War the Pacific where's obviously often cited as the main evidence for the carrier overtaking the battleship as the decisive weapon of sea warfare so I suppose the the one of the most iconic aircraft involved in that definitely needs to be considered when it comes to looking at that whole argument in its context as well and of course it's also a very interesting topic for anyone who's interested in the military vehicles of any description it's pretty much one of the most recognizable aircraft profiles you'll you you see around these when when people look at some book covers and such like so yes thank you thank you very much for all of that research and hopefully we will revisit some other similarly interesting topics in the future and maybe we'll talk talk a bit more about warships sometimes you never know there's there's all sorts of interesting things that can be said especially I suppose nowadays referencing the video which I suppose probably by the time this goes up will maybe be about a month or so into the past forget about the the RV petrol and with all the clarifications that we're getting from the various wrecks that being discovered or rediscovered I should say yeah it certainly looks like it's gonna be an interesting time or for warships enthusiasts like myself in general but also I suppose specifically for yourself into a focus on the on that area in that particular area of conflict with everything suddenly appearing yeah it's it's been fascinating actually are watching seems like for a little while there is almost every every week at least something a sighting was coming up I'm particularly looking forward to it as and when they managed to find shikaku yes Albie yeah I mean that them discovering that about third of cargas mass had disappeared wasn't exactly surprising but yeah it'd be interesting to see what some of those other one other carries that one don't look like yes sir so as I think once again it's many thanks for that that's a tremendous amount of work that's been put in and hopefully for those of you listening it's either cleared up a lot of issues or perhaps hopefully dispelled some myths about the the zero in particular but also in a much broader context hopefully give some idea that even with something that is as well known as the zero there can be an awful lot of misinformation and miscommunication that goes around and this is why the work of scholars and researchers when it comes to this kind of field even though it's pushing what nearly 70 years after the conflict ended or more it's either either this work is still not done and this still needs to be an awful lot more said about it oh yeah I actually loved being here and I'm actually a big fan of the channel so I get to live my dream good yeah it expanded the scope of this expanded far more than I originally intended I was aiming if I was aiming for 30 minutes and we're like by pushing three hours yes I'll be like that yeah Oh a slight margin for margin of error there yes so yes well we are suppose it's fitting for the zero it's the zeros except in the long range fight and we conduct an exceptionally long range fall but with that I suppose we should let everyone else who's hopefully listening to this get get back to their their lives and and so on so it was a thanks everyone for listening if indeed you still are at the end of this and we hopefully will see you again in another video that's it for this video thanks for watching if you have a comment or suggestion for a ship to review let us know in the comments below don't forget to comment on the pinned post for drydock questions

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 833,459

Rating: 4.800199 out of 5

Keywords: wows, world of warships, Zero, Zeke, A6M, A5M, IJN, USN, WW2, Pacific Campaign, aircraft carrier, Akagi, Kaga, Shokaku, Zuikaku

Id: ApOfbxpL4Dg

Length: 153min 8sec (9188 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/The_Human_Oddity]

It was much more commonly called Zero-sen by pilots rather than Reisen as presented in-game.