Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
Axis History Forum • View topic - Captured Hellcat...the Japanese learned form analysis of aircraft shot down or captured. American intelligence received a shock in the summer of 1945 when an aerial photo taken late that May over the Japanese base Tachikawa revealed a large four-engine bomber, dubbed the "Tachikawa Field 104." After the war investigators discovered the plane had actually been an American B-17 Flying Fortress. The plane was a product of Japanese air technical intelligence. Tachikawa happened to be the location of the Army's Aviation Technical Research Institute. Yokosuka, of course, housed the Navy's 1st Air Technical Research Arsenal. Both units sent specialized teams right in behind the Japanese assault troops. From Clark Field the Japanese recovered the turbo-supercharger of a B-17 plus other kinds of spare parts. Eventually an entire B-17E was put together from the collection. Another would be recovered in the Netherlands East Indies, put together from the remains of fifteen B-17s wrecked on airfields there, and a third was found in pretty good shape in the same area. Designer Kikuhara Shizuo, who had originated the [Kawanishi H8K] Emily flying boat, noted how impressed he was that the United States had perfected the B-17's subsystems to such a degree that a minimum of controls were needed in the cockpit.
What the Japanese did with the B-17 they tried with many other planes, studying crashed aircraft, making photos and drawings, salvaging parts, and so on. This effort, like so many others, began as early as the China Incident, where the Japanese recovered a P-40E fighter and an A-20A twin-engine bomber. Within the JNAF these studies were conducted by the same people who did the design work for Navy planes. Thus, of 327 personnel at the Yokosuka main office of the Research Technical Arsenal and 186 at the branch office in Isogo, it has been estimated that roughly 10 officers, 10 civilian designers, and 150 enlisted men worked on studies of foreign aircraft.
Navy Lieutenant Toyoda Takago was one designer who worked in the foreign-technology program. He reports that the Japanese Army sent out most of the field teams, subsequently supplying the JNAF with copies of their reports and lending them aircraft as desired. The single team Takogo remembers the JNAF dispatching went to Burma to study a crashed Mosquito light bomber. But the Navy center would be sent aircraft recovered in the Southern Areas and would send teams to crash sites in the Empire area, including Okinawa, where an F6F Hellcat was recovered after raids in October 1944. British carrier raids in the Netherlands East Indies earlier that year yielded a TBM-1C Avenger. Yokosuka's specialists were surprised at the "extremely strong construction." When an F4U Corsair was captured near the Kasumigaura flight school, "we were surprised there were places on the wing covered with fabric." The JNAF recovered the flight manual for the B-24 Liberator in the summer of 1944, and flew a captured F6F Hellcat. The comparable Army unit also flew the Brewster Buffalo, the Hawker Hurricane, the B-17D and E, and the PBM Mariner.
Flying experience and ground studies were used to compile reports on the foreign aircraft, but because the specialists were preoccupied by their own design work, the studies of foreign planes were fairly basic. Only very late in the war was a special section of three officers and twelve to fourteen men formed just to track foreign technology, first under Commander Nomura Suetsu, then under Iwaya Eichi...
YesI should have been more specific. It was the "units" part of the original post that I saying doubtful to. Units in the sense of a group of aircraft, not units in the one item sense
I suppose the Japanese always had problems flying these aircraft because they lacked the right fuel
for them.
A bit off topic but what is true about American captured pilots being executed/decapitated?
Kris
I suppose the Japanese always had problems flying these aircraft because they lacked the right fuel
for them.
A bit off topic but what is true about American captured pilots being executed/decapitated?
Kris
I suppose the Japanese always had problems flying these aircraft because they lacked the right fuel
for them.
Kris