t seems the lessons you learn fighting a less potent enemy will require a quick recalibration when you finally meet your match. How quickly and efficiently you can accomplish that will determine your prospects in the long slog of an attrition war.
Totally agree, especially in Japan's case. They did misinterpret a lot and completely underestimate how the United States would react, to their detriment.
What strikes me as interesting about this whole debate regarding the Japanese philosophy of manoeuvrability and little self protection for their aeroplanes is that we, the observers so many years later apply what we know and can only know in hindsight to argue that the Japanese were somehow stupid for doing so. The reality was that
everyone was doing what the Japanese were doing, even the Americans. The P-36 was a decent dogfighter (that doesn't get nearly enough attention - I might be biased, I think it's cooler even than the P-40) and could out-manoeuvre the Spitfire and Hurricane, which in themselves were good dogfighters, which proves that manoeuvrability was definitely a virtue in fighters of the late 1930s vintage.
The Japanese took it to extremes in the A6M, of course, but we are so ingrained with that aircraft's history that we believe that it was the be-all and end-all of Japanese design philosophy, but it wasn't. No other fighter the Japanese built was just like the Zero - except other Zeroes of course. Even Horikoshi's subsequent designs eschewed the Zero's advantages for those things we think the Japanese ignored. Yes, the philosophy of the Ki-43 was the same as the A6M, but it wasn't achieved at the same expenses as the A6M. Its design was based on limited engine power, like the Zero, but we simply don't acknowledge that changes in fighter philosophy, like heavy armament, boom and zoom manoeuvres, armour plate and self-sealing tanks came as a
result of experience with enemy aircraft, not strictly beforehand.
Combat in Europe, as I mentioned earlier illustrated the need for self-sealing tanks, armour plating and heavier armament, but as mentioned, these took time to implement. There were still Bf 109s in frontline service with only four machine gun-calibre weapons in the spring/summer of 1940. The RAF had frontline fighters with eight guns, more than anyone else's fighters at the time, but they still weren't heavy hitting enough and first contact with the enemy in late 1939 proved that the pilots still had to empty their magazines just to bring down a single Heinkel. Spitfires and Hurricanes didn't get heavy cannon as standard until after the Germans. The A6M had cannon as standard, ironically.
So, to conclude, what we were doing was little different to what the Japanese were doing. They took it quite far with the A6M, but it was not the norm. We like to think that these advantages our fighters had were a given because we've come to accept that, but in the first year to two years of WW2, they simply weren't.