Posted on 01/07/2019 2:06:39 PM PST by Snickering Hound
And for those who, like me, had a memory lapse on the Shiden Kai’s Allied code name it was “George.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawanishi_N1K
From the deep recesses of my memory, I recall reading that when the Ki-84/Frank was tested using 100 octane avgas, its performance easily matched and slightly exceeded the Hellcat, Corsair, and P-51.
No, the Japanese made some terrifyinglt good aircraft.
What they could not make were reliable engines.
No. They didn’t. The gas tank in the Zero was located directly behind the pilots seat. They were made almost entirely from aluminum , they didn’t have self sealing gas tanks and their pilots didn’t use parachutes, or very rarely used them.
The late model Jap aircraft all had either CO2 systems or self sealing fuel tanks. The follow on to the Zero, the a7m, was good plane. I don’t know why that plane took so long to go into productions. The Japs did some real stupid stuff in WWII.
I just finished reading Sakai’s autobiography.
He felt that the Japanese had turned out two fighter aircraft that were equal to anything the Americans had. They just couldn’t produce large numbers of them because their factories were destroyed.
It was fascinating to read about the war from the point of view of a Japanese fighter pilot.
Read about the training program for the Japanese Navy Fighter Pilots.
It was very intense and produced great fighter pilots.
But, it didn’t produce enough of them.
They also suffered from an intense and disruptive rivalry between the Army and Navy.
Lastly, they had a culture that glorified individual combat.
They weren’t very good at teamwork.
Look at the kill ratios of American planes to the Japanese throughout the war. The Japs got creamed every time. Christ sake dude, it’s almost always “America sucks’’ with you. The simple fact of the matter about 90 per cent of what the Japs made was crap and almost 100% of their military tactics were even worse. On that I would agree. Holy Smokes, a freakin’ miracle , we’ve agreed on something.
As usual you are unable to discuss anything in a academic context which leads me to believe you are basically lacking in formal post secondary education. I am not calling you stupid but you lack a curiosity to explore detail and the hypothetical.
That is not based on fact. The Japs had many more aircraft in their arsenal than that and some of them were very good to excellent. This is what I was trying to discuss with you but you are incapable of and academic discussion about anything,
Provide data on that General. And please, lets not talk ‘’academic’’ ok? You’re the furthest from that.
First of all both the zero and the betty bomber were not good aircraft. They were terrible aircraft and obsolete by 1942. They fell apart when hit with one bust of machine gun fire. Most burned up before hitting the water.
The Japs realized this and made much better aircraft but had numerous production problems which prevented them for fielding these superior aircraft in large numbers. But they had them, especially George and Frank.
Yep.
Lost his eye in that fight.
They were extremely demoralized by the B-17 and the B-29.
The Japanese bombers were horrible.
The Japanese Navy had a real problem with calling off an attack just when they were ready to win big.
Pearl Harbor is an example, but an even bigger mistake was their pullback from the Indian Ocean.
They were deathly afraid of losing carriers, and then lost four of them at Midway.
I think another big problem for the Japanese was their lack of radar.
They lost a lot of planes on the ground because they never knew when we were coming.
Now you’re contradicting yourself.
I think their Samurai history was helpful in some ways, but very destructive in others.
They suffered horrible losses in Burma and New Guinea and Guadalcanal.
They were more concerned with not showing fear than they were with winning.
Oh hell yeah. Burma and New Guinea were awful for all the combatants but especially for the Japanese. Malaria, dysentery ravaged both the allies and the Japs. The difference was our medical corps could better handle it. We had quinine and morphine. The Japanese didn’t. We could evacuate our wounded. Theirs got a hand grenade to end their misery.
The arisaka action was tested by P.O. Ackley after the war, along with every mauser action variant, it was the only one that couldn’t be tested to failure.
Were they made rough and largely unfinished toward the end of the war, yes. None that haven’t been torch heated are unsafe. Good base for a custom rifle.
The nambu suffers from a competing sized cartridge, one should remember that size the average Japanese man was during the war for the answer to that riddle.
As for airplanes, had they had even a more competitive manufacturing ability most of Asia and the Pacific would be speaking Japanese, including all of china.
Ponder how much different Asia would have been during the 50-90s had a single country been in charge. Anyone think it would have been worse?
Over it all academically one had to be dishonest with the facts to think how it turned out was any better.
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