Japanese lightly built carrier aircraft

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There was a Hellcat pilot in my Dad's club of veteran pilots who saw combat in the first Battle of the Philippine Sea. He said he never saw so many Zekes. He said there must have been hundreds of them. He said in the Hellcats, "It was like swatting flies." I'll never forget that, those were his exact words.

Maybe one day some 15-year-old scholar will put it in Wikipedia wherein it can immediately attain the distinction of being a creditable fact.

PS: You never know, these days.
 
Just to clarify SR. I think you are saying Zekes had excellent range, adequater firepower, and good manouverability in the horizontal plane. they were quite good climbers. Diving was less good, because of the light weight/wing loading. Crew protection virtually nothing
 
Last point is it was as strong as any of our planes in withstanding g-gorce, but could not handle much battle damage without being seriously degraded in structural strength ... it was strong but fragile. The engines and propellers were VERY reliable.
 
maybe, but I dont think so. Zekes predecessor, the Claude is often touted as the first IJN fighter that was an all Japanese design. In designing and developing the Zeke, Horikoshi used an all Japanese team. Theree may have been british designed components, sort of like Chinese tail lights in modern day Harleys.
 
N4521U said:
Didn't the British help design the Zero?
Just askin.
Click to expand...

Never heard that one. Sounds like a remnant of that old 'Japs could never have built something that good" attitude that resulted in the still repeated assertion that the Zero was a copy of the Hughes racer or the Gloster F.5/34. Allied troops were even told that Japanese soldiers were all short sighted and their rifles were so weak the bullets would bounce off you. Guess they learned in a hurry...
 
Yes, the Japanese offensive, of which the zero was a part, was a case of the mouse that roared. Whilst an obvious case of national hari kari, the fact that the japanese could so successfully shake up the tree so dominated by the Americans and the British is something still quite hotl;y denied and minimised by many. The Japanese lit the fuse of Asian nationalism that so completely altered the world stage, and continues to do so
 
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