WW2 Armour and Fuel Tank Protection - What They Don't Tell You

we're professionals here professionals okay four times a charm just like what world wars hello everybody and welcome back to military aviation history I'm your host Bismarck ER today I am joined by Justin hello Justin hello Justin doesn't really need an introduction here on the channel those that have been following the past couple of months on the videos will have noticed that I have referred to him a couple of times he is an expert on Japanese naval and army aviation and he also has a great interest in US naval aviation in the Pacific Theater and he has also published in this regard now today we're going to talk about a topic that both in he and me find very fascinating that is aircraft protection and all the sort of stereotypes that float around the myths and the reality and we're going to be contrasting these things and kind of give you a complete overview about this topic we're going to start a little bit of pre-war developments with World War one and then the interwar years then we're gonna go into a comparison between some of the major actors during World War two and finally we're going to have a specific case study where Justin is going to have a lot of information for us on Japan and why essentially it is as we call it in our notes the great stereotype that really doesn't hold up to too much scrutiny these not stereotype doesn't hold on too much to scrutiny but well we'll go into that as we go along now Justin for for the pre-war developments let's say World War one how are things when it comes to aircraft protection at that point in time well it's very of course rudimentary so apparently in first world war low-flying aircraft of course proved honorable fire so there were some attempts to to kind of put together some kind of armor protection for the crew that were engaged there for aircraft that were engaged in low-level attacks from the source I read actually the earliest form of fuel tank protection was actually a Lockheed any design of the Curtiss HS 2 L was a flying boat in 1918 so you can see that like actually like theories are like wanting to put Armour or feel tank protection and aircraft went way back you know all the way to first world war but of course particularly with filled tank protection there was what they wanted to do or theorized about what they could actually do you know with designing at actual fuel tanks to protect things yeah I mean they did the the air war really kicks off with World War one in 1916 with the Battle of data and from that onwards there are certain ideas that float around like we have to protect the airplane we have to protect the pilot but the planes initially I mean if we look at the horsepower rate of those engines I mean we're speaking off of the horsepower rating somewhere between 80 to 200 horsepower throughout World War two you know obviously at the end we're starting to see machines which are relatively powerful for the time but the performance isn't even there to install kind of that rudimentary armor as we conceptualize it nowadays with these armor plates and so on I've seen some material apparently that the Germans tried to armor certain aspects of the engines of their Agathe bombers and also they tried to protect the pilots from ground fire especially in when once they started going strongly into the kind of fluffly go to battle fliers and and they started thinking about putting small our plates four millimeter maximum beneath the pilots to protect them things change however in the interwar year and this is where it gets very interesting because we see the stark divide between what is possible in terms of fighter protection and what is possible for protection in terms of bombers and especially there and then lend a lot later of Rudys I think we see the major developments do we see anything in the 20s do you know anything there not a whole lot at least from what I've read it's kind of the 20s were either a slight continuation of stuff in the First World War or they just for road protection all together yeah I'm from anything I've seen yes it's it really is I think also from from what I've seen that idea is kind of there that yeah maybe we can face art think about protection but the performance of most aircraft just doesn't allow it and we're not just talking about speed and top speed and so on but well go into performance later on le as as we talk about these issues what we start seeing then is is sort of in the late thirties is a couple of countries the Soviet Union and Germany start going into protection for the aircraft Soviet Union starts going into protection for their for their fighter planes the i-15 biplane fighters the i-16 start getting some rudimentary protection actually when I say rudimentary I think I'm taking a little bit away from from what it actually was it was substantial was I think nine millimeters in some places yeah nine millimeters at that point in time and you got to remember that we're talking about a time when most aircraft were armed with two to maybe four rifle caliber or machine guns so this kind of arm work played would pretty much soak that up completely if if it would get hit with that were that kind of caliber with the Germans we don't see any kind of focus on fighters but we see it on bombers what do lips did Germans do at this point in time well from yonkers 86 was apparently the first German bomber to receive kind of rudimentary protection for its fuel tanks and that occurred in 1937 this was followed by the Dornier 17 in 1938 interestingly next came the Japanese army with the key 20 later model of the key 21 because obviously they've been fighting in China so they tended to burst into flames and the army we should have noticed this so they got they were the next half of the Germans to get protection and this actually occurred before the Americans are British so again you know we can start seeing that that stereo but what is interesting in there is that the Soviet Union Germany and Japan are fighting in the late 40s oh it's just ov it Union and Germany are sort of engaged in Spanish Civil War whereas the Japanese are engaged in the sino-japanese war and the oh and actually the Soviets are also engaged with the Chinese at some point sorry with the Japanese so it's interesting these countries are the ones that are fighting at this point and they're also the ones that are starting to implement some kind of armor one one random interesting aside is the Japanese army actually purchased a few be our 20s Italian be our 20s as intermediate aircraft before the key 21 was ready and one of the main complaints of the BR 2020 was that it was a death trap like they gained that reputation of burning up you know yeah our the other countries like that let's say you know UK Britain obviously and the United States they have military observers in Spain and in China what are these guys sending back to to their you know country of origin and are they telling people of the experiences with armor if that this is something that is worthwhile to look into so I can only really speak for the US they gave this reputation but they're actually fairly late become relatively late comers to the concept of armor and and fuel tank protection for their aircraft however once they decide to start going down that road they adopted with with Gus no they they really push it forward but you know as it stood in say 1939 all the principle combat aircraft the US Army Air Corps had no armor or fuel tank protection and the US Navy was the same way you know even fast-forward to December 7th 1941 the aircraft in Hawaii it's kind of a mix some have you know ok protection some have no protection and then there's some that have fairly good protection and that's you know all the way to up to the start of the war with Japan so you you kind of see that it's not quite as simple as it's often portrayed at least for that for the u.s. I don't know what you can add for the British in 1949 there is the first regulations that are and a push forward to start adding some kind of armor to the Hurricanes and the Spitfires the initial thing is to have the kind of armored windscreen it's kind of fitting it right in front of the cockpit so to protect the pilot from incoming fire from from his font essentially the thinking is that this is something that will help save his face in case he's attacking a bomber and his defensive fire coming his way interestingly between the Spitfire and the hurricane but this makes sense the hurricane is actually prioritized at why is the Huracan priority is because the Hurricanes are in fact engaged in combat or in some sort of combat in 1949 and definitely in 1940 because they are deployed to France whereas the Spitfires kept back so while this provision did pass and ended well while the RAF is saying right we're starting to going to add this kind of protection to both our fighters the hurricane is definitely prioritized and it does take some time until these armored windscreen screens are actually added the Spitfire start getting them for the evacuation of Dunkirk that's where we see the first Spitfires that have this kind of armor but again this is not standardized this is this this stuff is sent out to the squadrons you know here's a box of armored wind screens used him as you want and then they start fitting them to some planes and some note and actually the pilots initially don't want protection you know gallant s this kind of funny story where he was he was given this armor that rest for his head and he turns it on to his crew sheep I'm screaming at him telling him look I can't see you to my to my six now what are you doing and then in the next fight he is literally saved by that by that back plate you also have the same story with a pilot from the RAF flying a Spitfire during the evacuation at Dunkirk where you know he's gets really really angry that his finger pieces fit it because he says like it's too heavy I can see now and so on and then actually you know that play takes to a free German mg 15 bullets and it saves him do we see the same thing in in Japan and the u.s. oh yeah of course the u.s. from what I've seen there was some skepticism I mean there's outright controversies of course the most famous being the f4 f4 mm which was much maligned when it initially entered service pilots were not happy at all with it because and it was more than just armor I mean they've been adding some improvised armor into VF for every boilerplates but yeah yeah but they also increase the armament they basically added a whole bunch of weight to the plane and the US Navy pilots are like what the hell are you doing hmm we're one of them actually dismissed it's like hyperbolic but you can kind of he described it as trying to fly a TV DVD with the torpedo now of course that's hyperbole but you can see like how annoyed that they are that they're that people that you know in from their perspective aren't on the frontlines fighting they are shoving all this crap up into the plane that's dropping the performance and again with the Japanese you see it one specific example I can is there was one unit of key 48 simple actually light bombers hmm which was which ended up actually being very heavily protected except for there was some at least one unit that they would remove all of the armor plate from the aircraft because they just they just thought it wasn't worth it they just wanted a little extra performance but yeah you'll see that all over the place B I know I think particularly for the Army armor plates in their fighters they were designed to be pretty easy to take in and out in the field yeah so of course you have individual pilots or units that would say no no armor or yes I want the armor or whatever now with going back a little bit here to the RAF and Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain because I think this is where we really start seeing a great shift and a great interest picking up in in when it comes to armor as I said of course the 109 doesn't have any kind of substantial armor until the e4 variant it does not have any sign of self-sealing fuel tanks just yet and one of the issues that the Germans have there is because the fuel tank for the 109 is actually designed to fit under the seat it is sort of an L shape it's pretty much it looks exactly like like a very comfortable kind of sofa and this this makes it a little bit hard to actually create a self-sealing contraption in that space with that now I actually went to the National Archives in Kew here in London and I went through some of the files they have there on our protection especially on the Spitfire they have a lot of stuff there and it's interesting how much effort is starting roughly in late 1940 where all these things are being added to the aircraft how much interest it is how much interest is given to this aircraft protection so we start seeing because for example the RAF bombers didn't have any protection during that time I ever and it started with a pilot like kind of headrest for the pilot again for the net for a seat and then with armored bulkheads and also for protection of the engine one of the tests I saw was with a Halifax so they started firing I think it was roughly 300 rounds of 7.92 a millimeter Mauser into the engines and they used the starboard outer and the port inner engine and they realized that the starboard outer even though the the shape of the engine and the protection of that engine it's a finger that's six millimeter plate is the starboard outer is a lot more susceptible to damage than the port inner and the report said well the reason why this is is because the inner engines have a housing for the gear and the gear absorbs all the shots going in and it's not actually the armor that saves the engine because on the outer engine that that one is gets shot to bits even by 7.92 millimeter rounds which is kind of interesting so there's a lot of testing done here but people often don't understand is that like even though people have been theorizing or even tinkering a little bit about it for you know 20 ish years it's really in the very late 1930s into the war that this bread this is a brand-new technology with all of the experimentation and failure and oh well you know this didn't work so we're gonna go back to the drawing board and come up with something else so initially a lot of the time what you're seeing is the RAF you can probably actually describe there there least attempts at protecting their fuel tanks better than I can but it so they start wrapping their fuel tanks in this thing called lunatics and it is sort of it is interesting minute X because on the one hand side are EF tells their own pilots that this stuff works and what you know and that this is going to allow their fuel tanks to sustain a couple of hits and still because Linnet x is kind of impregnated with rubber and so on and it's gonna sue ello up and it's gonna fix those leaks it doesn't work I mean it works in some cases on to some degree but it really it is really limited let's say but they tell their own pilots Linnet ex works the problem is only that a lot of planes did they were designed without kind of this kind of protection in mind so we have to spit for air who has two fuel tanks one kind of sits flush right in front of the pilot in that fuselage and actually on top of that there's a three millimeter deflector plate it's literally a deflector plate of an aluminium aluminium there we go alloy and what has meant to do is is is going to incoming fire that kind of comes at you from straight ahead again from a bomb or a defensive fire let's say it's kind of hit that alloy and it's going to be deflected away they know it's not going to be able to sustain damage coming in from a straight angle but from this these kind of very steep angles it's going to be deflected away however because this engines are so flush inside the fuselage they cannot make this tank self-sealing or wrap it in this kind of lunataks the attack below that can leave can be wrapped at and the same thing goes with the the hurricane think the one of the tanks is I can't remember it was it was the wing so it was the internal one cannot be wrapped in and in this kind of stuff because it just doesn't fit so actually picking up from what you said earlier about the American planes in the Pacific that have absolutely no sanitation between them so they're here yeah p-40s of different variants you have the beast you have two seas you have the ease all with kind of different armor and fuel tank protections if they if they actually do have it you also see the same of the Germans there is initially absolutely no standardization between the even the armor plates so you have the bombers and the Ju 87 so have a different kind of armour composition from the material that is being used so some of them have like a silicon mag and Agony's steel that there's those that have like chromium steel and so on so they they I think the RAF actually in the tests that I've done from all this stuff that fell from the sky during the Battle of Britain found five different types of armour plating the Germans used and that kind of again shows you there is no standardization at this point what is actually interesting is that the RAF used a Heinkel 111 bomber it kind of you know crash-landed but they did the shape of the bomber and that fuselage was still fine and it fired 140 rounds into it trying to see if it can penetrate the crew compartment because there is this big 10 millimeter bulkhead between the actual fuselage and the crude compartment and only 48 bullets from those 140 bullets that were fired actually hit the armor plating which shows you that even though they had a direct shot it was 10 degrees a store and directors 20 degrees astern they knew where that plate was and they were specifically aiming for it but the bullets piercing through the shell of the bomber and also you know any kind of equipment that might be in the way they tumble they get deformed and so on and so forth and they might actually not hit the armor pen armor protection so with a roughly 30% of hits on that armor plating only two managed to penetrate and those were from 50 yards by roughly 50 meters direct the stern which shows you the kind of protection that is afforded by that armor plating especially considering that during the Battle of Britain the the RAF was only firing for your freeze at this point in time obviously 8 / / airplane not just one but the the problem of the German bombers during that time is that the engines were in armored not that they didn't have any kind of protection for the crew or a few times however now going into Japan the great stereo there we go justin is already preparing himself for Fisk why is that a naval Navy hat yeah this is an IGN officers cap there we go might as well embrace it um so how are things done in in Japan um I'll start asking you for the Bombers what's going on with the board so uh like with any stereotype there is truth to it so you know I'm not gonna be like oh well actually everything they had was amazingly well protected it's like no I there's no truth to the stereotype but it's more complicated than is often portrayed in pretty much any book I've ever read I mean examples from maybe because I guess I'll quickly mention there is a Japanese Navy Air Service at a Japanese Army Air Service and they don't like that matter and they don't like they don't like each other and they don't work together at all they share virtually no components they they couldn't even agree on the definition of what is a cannon what is not a cannon like what kind of caliber constitutes a cannon the army I think says 20 millimeter that's a cannon the Navy says 40 millimeter meaning that they are the Army's 12.7 or up is like there we go yeah the Navy all of them are are machine guns because the Navy's logic is it's a 30 millimeter that's a that's a machine gun that's like adorable something makes perfect sense to me but I guess I'll I'll dig into a couple examples relatively deeply because they're the most famous that being the meanies g4m which is the land based attack aircraft their main bomber of the war basically so the Navy actually understood like that their bombers were vulnerable from combat experience in China when you read Japanese monographs compiled by officers posted or and historians have dug into like various reports during the war itself and they're like they were looking at casualties among their bomber bomber forces which are quite high initially and they're noting that like a lot of the time at this time it's the g3m it's the predecessor to the g4f right yeah yeah of course we know famously that the g4m was very vulnerable to catch on fire well it's because their logic was went as follows so yes okay initially bomber losses were very high but that's because there was no fighter escort they were operating at low altitudes there's we've learned a lot since then and once we started tweaking our tactics and started escorting our bombers and bomber in performance started to increase bomber losses dropped exponentially and they dropped to a level that the Japanese Navy deemed was acceptable now of course a lot of people now are thinking well okay you think I've start seeing the flaws in this logic the first massive loss of a g4m g4m occurred in an unsorted low-level attack against Lexington in February 1942 13 of 17 bombers were destroyed and this is really one of the main areas where the Navy's logic began to fall to pieces because the g4m was actually designated as a land-based attack aircraft from not a medium bomber and that's like okay well who cares well it means that in the Navy's mind the g4m was a torpedo bomber first and a bomber second so they would be conducting you know g4s would be conducting attacks at low level against heavily defended targets fleet targets therefore suddenly you're you know improved bomber performance is largely negated because they're you know 50 meters in altitude you can't really hide from enemy fighters one of the main reasons why g4m losses were so horrific in the global kemal campaign was the operational circumstances they were operating an extreme range but very importantly for our losses the Wildcats were able to consistently attack them from an altitude advantage which was really made possible by Coast launchers and of course attacking from high they would get what if a planform view of the aircraft when they were diving past that which was their preferred method of attack and they get a beautiful shot we can fuel tanks and all of this all of this kind of combined to create very high bomber losses for the g4m because the g4m depended on its performance and fighter escort so he could buzz him bomb us out but the fighters keeping up their fighters away from it it wouldn't need to get shot at in 1943 they introduced kind of a sheet a thick sheet of self-sealing material under on the underside of the wings in fact if if you're very keen at looking if you ever get like a shot of the underside of a g4m and your g4 m1 and you're trying to figure out maybe what area in production there's it was there's a few markers and one is you can very clearly see the self-sealing robber fly under the wing tanks is there a reason why it was fitted only under underside I mean I guess against ground fire or like inst flash yeah so conspirers this would do absolutely nothing yes so what they what they looked at was in the Guadalcanal like I said they would attack like this on the Americans and the Japanese did tests and they found out that fight air started in fuel tanks not so much when bullets entered the fuel tanks but when they exited them so when you're attacking from above the bullets of course are passing through the wing and passing out the underside so they were looking at that and it actually proved effective in testing they're like well when they do attack patterns like that yeah the this kind of protection does actually work reasonably well the problem is of course it's completely useless if you're attacked from basically any other angle yeah so so it's very marginal protection they also added little five millimeter armor plates to the tail that were proved so useless in combat that pretty the first thing you got did when you got one of these g4 M's factory-fresh is he took a five millimeter plate son of the tail is my understanding they just didn't like they thought they were completely useless how is it fifty the army with the bummers at this point army bombers yes this is where a major difference because I kind of alluded earlier that the army also noticed that there they were having problems of fires in China so but instead of the Navy's solution of well we're gonna find tactical solutions and fighter escort to get around the fact that we need to protect our bombers you could almost say kind of wishful thinking the Army's like okay no we need to start exploring protection features for the Bombers themselves so from very early on from 38 the key 21 receives a very rudimentary field to thank protection that's kind of their standard medium bomber and any subsequent that the design requirement for the key 49 which would be that was the planned successor to the key 21 right in the design requirement it explicitly stated heavy armor and fuel tank protection explicitly in the design requirement this is a Japanese plane let's remember they explicitly asked for protection just like that and when you look at the key 49 leased by the key 40 92 which is a later model I've seen like the I know you've seen it two of the actual layout of the armed its lavishly protected for plane of its size and also knowing the reputation of the key 49 a spoiler alert it never really fully replaces the key 21 and it's hated by Japanese army pilots because it doesn't fly particularly well they consider it underpowered it's like when you look at the amount of armor in it why it's like this it's like an armor-plated it's like 16 millimeters or something I mean that cost yeah ridiculous they've got like bullets they've got bullet resistant screens for the pilots they've got armored seats they've got panels all the way back they've got it and it's like okay that's very impressively protected but it's like I can see why there were complaints that it was underpowered because because the thing must have just been ridiculously heavy oh yeah but anyway there's there's other any other like there ground attack aircraft that would enter service to key 51 it had our protection the key 48 initially it had rudimentary fuel tank protection and some armored protection which would steadily increase over time even their fighters the ki-43 one which is a kind of a notoriously vulnerable fighter and it had no armor protection initially and it's also exceptionally small and light but it had rudimentary fuel tank protection I usually started out initially as a three millimeter rubber sheath around a metal fuel tank so again very rudimentary better than nothing but not overly effective and the Japanese would find that out very early and again progressively they would upgrade the fuel tank protection over time well the interesting thing with the ki-43 is that eventually and I've actually in the previous video I've made on this topic I used two ki-43 and I compared it to the American people even Thunderbolt and the ki-43 the later production models have more protection inside of them and thicker armour plating of comparable strength than the p-47 but nobody would never say that p-47 doesn't hold this up against the fire as a ki-43 the ki-43 because crashes a bird's way before the the funderbolt which also shows you that armor protection and the protection that planes have isn't everything but anyway if we transition maybe to to the source I think of the great stereotype that we have of the Japanese and that's I think would be the a6m zero fighter yes in the room yes at this time so did most other fighters yes the British and the Germans were transitioning of course the the Soviets were ahead of the game by years the Americans though they pretty much at this point pretty much everything's unprotected still yeah it's very important to align 1942 zero gets introduced and this is literally the month for the Germans start thinking about putting armor in there Emile's the 109 Amy oh yes the 110 already has armor and yes the RAF and starts think about it in 1949 but really substantially the armor starts rolling out right at a time zero is implemented and this makes the zero in terms of its protection or its lack of protection absolutely status quo yeah it depletes that that have armor are the exceptions here yeah you know just as one example a very relevant example is the f4 f3 entered service with no armor or fuel tank protection and retro fitness would not be completed until after the start of the Lord with Japan so we're talking really early 1942 they start trickling in you know there's improvised armor plate there's retrofits to start upgrading some to self-sealing fuel tanks that there are wildcats in the initial parts of the war that see action with absolutely no protection even though of course the stereotype is well cat protection zero no protection it's of course a little bit more complicated than that however what makes the lack of protection in the zero unique is that the Navy refused to add protection features to the zero until really 1944 which of course is very late and this is where you can see that yes it's a stereotype but there's truth to it yeah because I mean they have added some to the Bombers to allude it to it with the g4m and they have they probably know what the army is doing which is probably another reason why they don't want to do it but you know did the army fighters and the bombers have sometimes lavishly protected aircraft I'm like you said with the ki 49 but well like you said the zero is the exception in that not in that it didn't have any armor or protection when it came out of the factories initially but that they never really implemented it until it was too late yeah like by 1944 they start to receive usually things like I remember right a 13 millimeter back plate and armored windscreen yeah and automatic fire extinguishers for the fuel tank so not self-sealing fuel tanks but if the fuel tanks lit on fire you could put the fire at one time the zero would eventually receive self-sealing fuel tanks I I can't tell you what model exactly because honestly every source I read gives me that for answer this is very not usual it's like this is normal in in late war Japan late for Germany you never know at what point any kind of modification was made because all those documents are either lost sealed away or you know are conflicting it's it's absolutely normal well I think this this transitions nicely into you know the kind of binary argument that people make with armor and self-sealing fuel tanks in in that it's like good is if you have it that is if you don't have it but they don't actually look at what problems from a design perspective and then also from a performance specific the armor has on an aircraft yeah so like our armor protection there are aircraft protection generally it's typically discussed in overly simplistic binary terms because it's usually mentioned in a book that's not concerned with it overly they just mention it in passing such and such plane had self-sealing fuel tanks and armored moving on I mean even in some of my reference work it's hard to because they're not consistently they're not consistent with telling you what level of protection they have yeah it's one of those characteristics that even sometimes reference books I've seen people you know with limit XVI with the wrapping around around the fuel tanks call it got self sealing it's not what I would call self sealing you know there's a certain amount of protection that maybe comes over minitex but it's not really self sealing and if you look at different kinds of self-sealing fuel tanks that come out for the war and that are installed in these aircrafts there's a lot of different models that offer different kind of protection and different kind of well they hold up differently on the fire let's say and and and and just saying all this plane has self-sealing fuel tanks yes that is one way of explaining the kind of protection that it has but it doesn't give you the full picture the important thing to really stress is that in 1940 41 42 South still in few Thanks it's a constantly improving technology it's not like we got self-sealing fuel tank problem Saul so you know as one example so in early 1942 the US Navy fueled the self-sealing fuel tanks in the f4f threes they began to leak and it was found that the gas gasoline with high aromatic content used by the US Navy was attacking the tanks of the linings hunt pack the outer skin of the filled tanks leading to further deterioration and swelling and bloating would occur and it would threaten the integrity of the entire tank and it took a considerable amount of Engineering and downtime to fix it for one example BF 42 on Yorktown April 10th 1942 at least 7 of its 19 f4f Brees where an outpour will due to fuel tank problems and for those of you that are more familiar with me early carrier operations one of the main complaints was we do not have enough fighters we need more fighters so losing 7 of 19 fight years on your carrier was like apocalyptic this is just one example of look these nations were experimenting with a brand new technology finding out something wasn't working and then going about fixing it and and really no one was exempt from that one of the things that I find interesting about these kind of armor protection is that pretty much every country as they're going for this develops the same I wouldn't call it exactly the same protection level of protection but very similar conception concept is Asians I mean for the Luftwaffe for the RAF and so on the idea was always of our armor plating has to withstand rifle caliber ammunition anything above that it's it's not gonna work out just find out although I did you know refer to that one test that I did with 20 millimeter ammo and the the the Americans I think they want to be resistant to 50 Cal bullets and they sort of get there but of course I think if we expand this a little bit the protection that an aircraft has is not just the armor plating because bullets as they go through the superstructure of of a plane to food a fuselage they will start tumble they were started forming armor is a saving throw in that sense I think it's if you know the crap has hit the wall and you really have no way of getting out of your situation there is the armor and it will hopefully save you it's one of those things it's hard to determine exactly because of course if a pilot ends up being killed you don't find out about it it's just like somebody shot the plane down they claim the plane but sometimes when you get descriptions for example Wildcats shooting up a zero and they'll they'll say that you shoot it up they pull up and they see the zero like it's not really smoking or anything like that but it kind of jerks and then maybe just start spiraling toward the C and that could be a evidence to suggest that quite possibly what they did was incapacitate or kill the pilot and the plane itself might still be somewhat flyable but it doesn't matter being an unpredicted aircraft does not always mean that every time you get hit you're gonna burst into flames or like grass and just like you protected aircraft art flying tanks that are liking destructive yeah you know there's plenty of counts of f4fs and p-40s and whatever going down in flames and then there's plenty of accounts of Japanese aircraft for example returning from the attack on Pearl Harbor where they've got dozens and dozens of bullet holes and concluding damage to their field tanks and they didn't earn and we were able to make it back to the carrier so it's kind of degrees of protection of course you'd rather be in a protected area aircraft getting shot up but it doesn't mean that you're invulnerable yeah I was going to so talk about your the price that you pay for armor protection and self-sealing fuel tanks I think that's what we can round up I I don't want to make inlighten kind of an honorable mention here io two's you know the the because people are going to talk about is Henschel one two nines all these ground attack aircraft that has been specifically be an armored to assist their mission which is to knock out tanks fortifications you know they do they do a lot of close air support and so on that armor is significant again it usually is in the realm of six to ten millimeters also if you go into some of the Bombers like the b-17s you know the autopilot servos back in the tail also a small box I think it's four millimeters at that point armored really doesn't do anything against the 12 20 millimeter bullet but it's going to go to fairly well for against shrapnel or or like a rifle caliber bullet you have to bulkheads between the the actual plane's fuselage and the crew compartment and you have not Apple bulkhead going into the Bombardier and so on and so forth so there are specifically designed armor panels in all those planes there and then you also have ad hoc protection like [ __ ] 190 a-8 store box the ones that were are supposed to go into a bomber formation and just shoot and shoot and shoot and shoot an ad at specific bombers and not care about incoming fire they have specifically armored panels added to the actual plane but there are prices you pay for this protection you already talked a little bit about that performance and so on maybe you have some specific examples there so one example I'll go back to G for M very briefly and it's like okay well why if they if the Navy recognized why or that their planes are burning up in China why not just what self-sealing fuel tanks and even if you change tactics and everything else it's like what do you give up right well they did the studies and with the the current design of the g4 m1 with the double wing spar in the internal wing fuel tanks they found out that if they just popped in a self-sealing fuel tank design that they had on hand it would drop the range by 45% which is for a naval bomber that is like I mean for any plane but I mean particularly for one that you're gonna be operating in the Pacific Ocean as a naval bomber that was like absolutely no so the basically what they said is okay well we can't do it now so the native users response was kind of like well we'll start doing like experiments with trying to get like a really good self-sealing fuel tank at some point down the line and would take years before the g4 and what finally received self-sealing fuel tanks - of course by this point Japan was entirely on the defensive so the extremely was no longer necessary for sustaining their operations and then when you just as the rough numbers comparison the g4 m1 model m and that was the first production model the maximum range according to friends bill and I just pulled the numbers out was 3,250 six nautical miles very impressive for twin-engine bomber mm-hmm and then the final production version and the G for m3 model 34 it had a maximum range of 2314 nautical miles and this was with a significant redesign they redesigned the wings that everything it was a quite a different a completely different plane but they changed a lot of weight and it's till you drop you you lost immediately a thousand nautical miles of range and this is not just the thing with the with the G forums I mean every single plane that had alluded to it earlier as well with the 109 that had a redesigned fuel tank because it's not just like okay you have a fuel tank that's not self-sealing and then you have a fuel tank that a self-sealing and you're gonna get the same kind of mileage out of it it's not because the space that that fuel tank has to inhabit is still the same space unless you completely change the structure of the wing where does the float I might be sitting or the central fuselage I actually also have some figures like with the p39 Airacobra the then the main fuel tank had a hundred I was a hundred and seventy gallons in it then they made it self-sealing and then suddenly had 120 gallons the b25 started out with 900 self-sealing it suddenly drops to 700 gallons those is that is that is a price that nobody talks about when it comes to fuel tanks it's like oh yeah self-sealing fuel taxes are important absolutely they added it self-sealing fuel tanks into the f43 the range all right they're already mediocre range dropped more it basically had had about a 200-mile combat radius from the carrier which is quite low for a carrier fighter and a lack of range and or endurance was was a serious complaint with the f4f pretty much through its entire life certainly before they added drop tanks because it didn't have been initially so they it was really compounding problems of course you're adding weight so uh eventually you'd end up with about 135 pounds of pilot armor behind the seat on the f4 f which of course had a pretty significant impact on performance particularly climbrate you took you again you take a mediocre climber II and then you had a whole bunch more weight to the plane and over because I was bad and the pilots were were quite angry about that as I mentioned before and also there's like lots of little things that people would never even think of including me until I read it for example when they were retrofitting the f4 f3 with self-sealing fuel tanks cuz it came in initially it didn't have them it completely screwed with the cockpit fuel gauges because of course you're changing the nature of the tank so the pilots would have to manually careful a total up the minutes that they had flown at various power settings to try and figure out how much fuel they had left which of course really increases the workload of the pilot quite significantly and when you're talking about operating over the Pacific Ocean the last thing you want to to do is you know make a simple arithmetic error and end up this is why you have to do your math with you at school because when you fly an F for F and B Pacific that those skills might come in handy there you go if that doesn't get you a studying I don't know what will so yeah I think we've kind of touched upon pretty much everything we want to wanted to say I mean we have a whole bunch of notes here that I'm sure people will tell us about you know some of the things that we might have missed which is fine if you want to add to the discussion that would be absolutely awesome if you do have any kind of information on specific aircraft if you've you know found some of the source material maybe in the archive so if you had a read a really good book please tell us down below in the comment section as well we're always interested in seeing where you know people nor their information from an out of discussion and they would be awesome we do have a couple of book recommendations already actually when when you were talking I turned around and pulled out a whole bunch of books that I have behind my seat and I was showing them into the camera and specifically also lindstrom of course the recommendation if you gave however there's one specific book I think that we should recommend here that is was William done yeah or Richard Dunn Richard Dunn with your dumb you know it's called Explo fuel tanks right okay a very appropriately named book yes I was I was hearing it heard around and that title would really grab people's attention for some reason yeah so Richard Dunn the exploding fuel tanks is a hands down recommendation from from my pardon also from Justin there's one book that I would also recommend I think it's called Anthony Williams flying guns of World War two he goes into the aircraft guns which is I think something that would also be interesting for you to look into you know if you take Richard Dunn's book about defensive measures and then you take Williams book about the offensive measures you can get a really cool picture there of how things are and specifically of course for the Pacific there's four commendations that I've put on screen and I also have them of course as with every video in there in the description below where we pull our sources from anyway Justin thank you very much for for for having a chat on this topic I'm sure we both will watch the comment section of great interest and hopefully you guys enjoyed it as well as always please do check out also our patreon it is the support for guys like you that make this channel the wheels of this channel go round and round and round and if you did enjoy this video please like and share it with your friends and as always we wish your great day good hunting and see us going

Channel: Military Aviation History

Views: 88,381

Rating: 4.9394956 out of 5

Keywords: WW2, Aviation, Armour, Fuel tank, Protection, A6M, Zero, fighter, history, forgotten, Japan, air force, education, myths

Id: w79xozi5c8U

Length: 47min 49sec (2869 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Very nice discussion!

[u/Dreams_of_Eagles]

3rd times the charm...just like world wars ??? !!!