Japanese Zero vs Spitfire vs FW 190

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Schweik said:
Against A6Ms specifically they would also continue to roll left in the dive because the torque of the Zero prevented them from rolling much at high speed.
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HUH?? Left? That was the Zero's strong suit. What the testing of the Akutan Zero revealed was a greater difficulty turning right rather than left at high speed. Remember Sakai Saburo escaping clouds of Hellcats with repeated hard aileron rolls to the left in his aging Zero?
Cheers,
Wes
 

Hello Nuuumannn,

My understanding was that the original intention was to use the Zuisei engine but that the Sakae was substituted because the speed requirement was not met. In "Eagles of Mitsubishi", I believe there was a discussion of the choice between using the Zuisei versus the Kinsei which would have resulted in a larger aircraft.


First of all, replacing it in 1940 would not have worked except to REDUCE the performance. Everyone here keeps quoting Sea Level and Take-Off HP ratings, but that is not the full story.

The Sakae 12 as installed in A6M2 was making
940 HP Take-Off
830 HP at Sea Level
950 HP at 4200 meters

The Kinsei 43 as installed in the D3A1 was making
1000 HP at Sea Level
1080 HP at 2000 meters
990 HP at 2800 meters
(from Война В Воздухе 25)

So what would result is perhaps a LITTLE better speed at low altitude but an overall loss in critical altitude.
60 HP may or may not offset the additional weight for climb performance but a loss of 1400 meters in critical altitude is probably going to cost some maximum speed.
The Kinsei got better, but this was what was available in 1940.
As for Water/Methanol injection, one has to wonder why the Navy never got a proper system working on the Sakae engine.
The Army certainly did with their version of the same engine and Water/Methanol was used on most of the other higher horsepower engines.

nuuumannn said:
Yes, the Kawasaki fighters were certainly excellent, but in the long run the other issue was that neither were carrier capable....
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Towards the end of the war, the Shiden-Kai was being developed into a N1K2-A carrier capable variant. I don't know how far that got but I don't think there were enough carriers left to bother at that point.


I first saw this in the test report of Hamp at Eagle Farm. I have also seen this in an excerpt from a translation of a captured Japanese manual. I don't have the original in Japanese and couldn't read it anyway.... My translator (Wife) happens to be in Tokyo at the moment.
That "someone else" who has used the same terms might be me....
Apparently the Model 32, 22, and 52 were all considered "Mark II".

You are right about the changes being much less than with other fighters. The 1130 HP versus 940 HP at Take-Off sounds like a substantial increase, but that is not the really important part. At altitude there really wasn't much increase at all. The only thing significantly different was the critical altitude.
950 HP @ 4200 meters
versus
980 HP @ 6000 meters

- Ivan.
 
Schweik said:
It's worth keeping in mind, there was nothing magical about aircraft armor. Armor and self-sealing fuel tanks were no guarantee of survival.
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Lets agree to disagree, there are hundreds of accounts of pilots surviving because of armour protection,
this is a good example, the only injuries the pilot sustained were splinters in his feet, the only part of him not protected by armour.
 
Schweik said:
It's worth keeping in mind, there was nothing magical about aircraft armor. Armor and self-sealing fuel tanks were no guarantee of survival. They certainly helped, but even very well protected planes like Fw 190s certainly caught fire and exploded
Click to expand...

PAT303 said:
Lets agree to disagree, there are hundreds of accounts of pilots surviving because of armour protection
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Survival anecdotes are not guarantees, merely improved probabilities. It's the survival vs attrition rates that count in the long run. Armor usually does pay off.
Cheers,
Wes
 
Except among the western allies, whose pilots had specified tours of duty rather than "fly 'til you die" as the Axis and Soviets did. Thus their valuable experience could be plowed back into the new trainees coming up through the replacement system, improving future survival rates.
Cheers,
Wes
 
Ivan1GFP said:
First of all, replacing it in 1940 would not have worked except to REDUCE the performance.
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So, why was Horikoshi convinced that the Zero should have had this engine? To answer my own question, Horikoshi was keen on the Kinsei because it was from his own firm, rather than the competitor's engine. I don't know if comparing performance of the Aichi D3A is going to give adequate figures for the Zero with the Kinsei in 1939, nevertheless, you are probably right regarding the figures, but surely the designer of the thing would know what he was doing in insisting on the engine throughout the aircraft's long career.

I first saw this in the test report of Hamp at Eagle Farm. I have also seen this in an excerpt from a translation of a captured Japanese manual.
Click to expand...

I have just looked through a copy of a Technical Air Intelligence document dated 24 September 1945 and on page 2 it states the following: "Manufacturer: Mitsubishi. Japanese designation: Type 0 Mark 2 Carrier Borne Fighter." So there it is. It would be interesting to find out the origin of this, especially since it hasn't come into common use and no references are made to it in books on the Zero. Looking forward to seeing a Japanese translation (hint hint...) Of interest is this page, which is copied from a US aviation magazine, which is about the A6M3 and there is no reference to Mk.2 here. It does give an excellent technical description of the type.

Design Analysis of the Zeke 32 (Hamp - Mitsubishi A6M3)

Towards the end of the war, the Shiden-Kai was being developed into a N1K2-A carrier capable variant.
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Actually the N1K4a Shiden Kai 4, of which only the one prototype was built in the Spring on 1945, although another source I stumbled onto on the internet states that two prototypes were built in 1944, which were trialled on the carrier Shinano. Too little too late, and with the Reppu having been settled on, the aircraft that was designed to replace the Zero at any rate, the N1K4A appears to have been a knee jerk reaction to the fact the Zero was still in service, rather than an intended development. The N1K series were designed from the outset as land based interceptors.

Kawanishi was drawing up a carrier based interceptor called the A8K by the war's end, which was never built, although work had begun on a mock up of the land based J6K Jinpu, from which the A8K was derived. The A8K was developed for the 20-Shi competition. Mitsubishi, with its hands very full by this time produced the paper A8M Rikufu, from what I have found.
 
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You are right, I got it backward. I always forget which direction the torque pulls on different fighters - same basic idea though.
 

Of course there are thousands of Allied pilots saved by their aircraft armor, but a concentrated burst of 20mm cannon shells, including by a zero, will tear an aircraft like that Spitfire apart, as it will sturdier and / or better protected fighters like a Fw 190 or an Il-2.

The effects of armor and self sealing tanks, and carbon dioxide in the tanks etc., was effectively incremental. It was not a magic cure to being shot down nor killed.
 

True but in the early battles, quite often precious few survived to rotate back home to train new pilots. USAAF in Java, Philippines, RAF in Malaysia, and USMC and USN the early days in the Solomons and both USAAF and RAF units at New Guinea are good examples in the Pacific Theater.
 

Hello Nuuumannn,

When the A6M was first designed, the selection was between the Zuisei and Kinsei and Zuisei won. The Sakae was simply a better engine for the EARLY A6M so it made sense to switch, but as you suggest, that could not have made Mitsubishi happy to install a competitor's engine in their brand new fighter. The numbers I listed were for a Kinsei of 1940. Perhaps the D3A1 installation isn't a great example but I could not find another variant of the same time period.
Switching to Kinsei that early would not have made sense in any case. They had already failed to meet the speed requirement with Zuisei. With Kinsei, I don't see how they would meet the range requirement that the light construction was paying for.

The Kinsei rapidly got more powerful. The Sakae really did not. By 1943 when A6M5 came out, the Kinsei still wasn't a 1500 HP engine but it was still much better than the 980 HP Sakae 21 that was being used and the strategic situation was changing.

Regarding A6M3 Model 32, I do wonder why the design analysis was done on this aircraft. It was the least produced variant and generally regarded as an unsuccessful design.

nuuumannn said:
The N1K series were designed from the outset as land based interceptors.
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You know better than that! N is a Floatplane Fighter.


That sounds like a serious waste of time when both companies had much better things to be doing. Do you happen to know what engines were these aircraft intended to use?

- Ivan.
 
Regarding the Spit V
It seems to have been an aircraft with a lot of potential, and a lot of bugs to iron out. Early Spit V, VB and VC had several disappointing combat engagements - over the Channel Front against Fw 190s but also against Bf 109Fs; in Soviet use in the Caucasus in 1943; and at Darwin they were basically defeated. In the MTO from mid 1942 - early 1943 they held their own but suffered heavy casualties and certainly did not dominate the Axis fighters (and they did not face a lot of Fw 190s in that Theater). There may have been numerous specific reasons for this in different Theaters but the engine boost ratings have been mentioned (contingent in part on the availability of high-octane fuel), as has the Vokes filter. There was also apparently a pretty severe problem with gun stoppages with their Hispano cannon. And there was the lingering issue with the carburetor as well.

The effectiveness of the Spit V improved dramatically as gun mountings were changed reducing the rate of stoppages and increasing ammunition, new tropical filters were developed. the use of finger - four / pairs formations was adopted beyond England, boost settings were increased from +9 to +16, and specialized low and high altitude variants were created optimizing performance for different missions. So as has been pointed out in the thread, and early configuration Spitfire V flying at low boost with the Vokes filter, at a maximum of +9 boost and jam prone cannons with 60 rounds per gun, was a very different aircraft from a Spit V flying at +16, with the Aboukir filter (or no filter), and more reliable cannons with 120 rounds per gun.

Regarding the Spit V in Darwin
At Darwin, there were several highly specific reasons for the debacle. First and I think foremost, maintenance and configuration problems. In a nutshell, the aircraft sent to Australia had some major problems flying and fighting especially above 20,000 ft where their performance edge was supposed to be most pronounced. Gun heaters either weren't installed or had been disconnected and guns repeatedly froze. The glycol had not been drained out when the fighters were shipped and there was a major (and largely unknown) problem with the coolant systems being corroded, and the constant speed propellers had major problems as well. If you read about the various engagements at Darwin you'll note that large numbers of Spitfires were being forced to break off due to mechanical problems.

As far as the tactics, the 'big wing' strategy adopted by Caldwell and embraced some of the other DAF Aces was a very hard won lesson from the MTO. In that Theater, Axis fighters, including Bf 109F and G, and Macchi 202s, consistently had an altitude and speed advantage against all the Allied fighters* (including the Spit Vs) so that the only safe way to prevent being repeatedly bounced from above was to form up into large units of 8-12 fighters and turn into all attacks from above, guns blazing, until the enemy fighters either broke off or lost sufficient energy to be engaged. The Zero was supposed to also have an advantage in climb, according to the legends extant at the time, and Caldwell expected similar problems. His skepticism of the American advice was also somewhat understandable as the Americans were still somewhat in a panic about A6M performance and were very much the students rather than the teachers in the MTO.

In reality - in theory - the Spitfires had superior performance at altitude and a higher critical altitude. But with all the mechanical problems above 20,000 ft the Spitfires were struggling up high. Add to this poor coordination of ground support in terms of early warning, weather forecasting and radio beacons, and the Spitfire pilots were really in a bad situation.

Finally at Darwin Caldwell was also contending with an extremely severe problem with their locally manufactured 20mm ammunition. Shells were coming out of the factories of different lengths, with numerous duds, some dangerous (at risk of exploding), and often tainted with sand or dust on them. He was forced to set up a pre-sorting system for cannon shells. This only exascerbated the already severe problems with gun stoppages and specifically at Darwin, freezing guns which took a while to discover and remedy.

Regarding the Spitfire more generally and the Fw 190
Nearly all the problems with the Spit V however were remedied by putting the merlin 60 series engine on it with the Spit IX, and the Spit IX was the solution to the Fw 190 problem. Once you had an aircraft which was just as fast but also vastly more maneuverable, the entire boom and zoom strategy of the 190 was hopelessly outmatched. You couldn't out run it, you couldn't out maneuver it, so what did you do? It was really the older and smaller Bf 109 that bore the burden of keeping up with Allied fighters.

The Spitfire went through many different iterations - for it's time, the Spit I was arguably the best fighter, certainly the best interceptor in the world. The Germans and yes the Japanese as well, proved challenging to the next generation, the Spit V in the early, days of it's deployments (and later deployments of older configurations in remote Theaters). But the Spit IX closed that gap and it never really opened again.

Spit IX, and the longer ranged and more sophisticated VIII, and the XIV etc. which came after, kept the Spitfire ahead of the Axis opposition and, barring jets, capable of enforcing air superiority until the end of the war. So in that sense the Spitfire was superior to the Fw 190.

S


* except for the P-38 - in theory - but they too were suffering from teething problems at altitude
 
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More broadly, I wanted to say I really enjoyed reading this thread, it is one of the classics of this forum in my book and I'm glad it was resurrected. Here is my $.02 overall.

There seems to be two schools here - the "conventional wisdom" school that the faster and higher flying planes with armor and heavy guns were always better, and therefore the zero was a dead end design. And the "revisionist" school which points out that the Zero was actually an excellent fighter which, despite a lack of timely upgrades, remained a major threat through 1943.

I tend to lean toward the latter argument but i have a different perspective. I think the Zero was the best overall fighter from 1941-1943 in the Pacific Theater. And the Ki-43 was no slouch either. In the West, the Spitfire, Bf 109 and Fw 190 vied for superiority, with the British winning the Battle of Britain but the Axis in ascendance for much of the period from 1941 - mid 1942, then being pushed back into an inexorable decline by 1943.

The Spitfire was the most important Allied fighter in the European Theater. But it never really had a major impact in the PTO or the CBI. This was in part because it took so long to send any, but it also had to do with the characteristics of the aircraft. It's range and suitability for rough and filthy tropical conditions being major problems.

The A6M had the superb range needed for the PTO, and proved capable of operating from rough airfields. I think it was indeed one of the great fighters of the war, even if it was not as much of a threat in 1944 or 1945 as it was in 1942 or 43. However I don't think it would have done well in Europe. Forget the enemy fighters, just operating over the heavy flak and integrated air defenses would have taken too much of a toll.

As I've pointed out before, I also think that ultimately, the best Allied aircraft on the Russian Front were the Russian Yak 9 and La 5 / 5FN series fighters. The Bf 109 and Fw 190 proved effective in NW Europe, over Russia, and the MTO, and ultimately in the doomed home defense of Germany. But they, like the Yak and the La 5, would have been near useless in the PTO or Burma.

Each Theater had it's own specific requirements, and in each Theater, the dominant aircraft rose up to meet them. The Americans made the anti-Zero in the F6F, and I do think that was a worthwhile addition to their force, as was the F4U. It's important to have those advantages over the enemy even if it does cause a lot of disruption for a significant period. Same reason the British needed the Spitfire and not just the Hurricane, even though the latter probably shot down more planes in the Battle of Britain.
 
Regarding the P-40 in the PTO

Of course I'm going to chime in on that. In all the discussion about Darwin in this thread, though the P-40 was mentioned, there was little review of the basic fact that prior to the Spitfires arrival there, the US 49th Fighter group had done essentially the same mission with ostensibly highly inferior fighters, and did a better job - from March to September 1942.

This is probably an ideal summary of the whole tour:

The USAAF 49th Fighter Group over Darwin: a forgotten campaign | The Strategist

But in a nutshell, they had an experienced commander Lieutenant Colonel Paul Wurtsmith (like Caldwell), but they only had a handful of experienced pilots to fly their 60 brand new P-40Es. To put in perspective: "out of its initial strength of 102 pilots, 95 had never flown the P-40 before. "

As with the later raids against the Spitfires, the Japanese came in mostly at high altitude, above 25 - 27,000 ft, in their attacks. P-40Es did not fly well at this height, which was 9,000 ft above their critical altitude and basically right at their service ceiling. Wurtsmith and his XO Don Hutchinson heeded the advice of the few combat veterans in their unit who had faced Japanese planes at Java and in the Philippines, and devised a strategy to win the battle.

They knew by then that the P-40 could escape Japanese fighters by diving away. They had (luckily) already adopted the finger-four system with two pairs, making this quartet a viable flying unit. So they would send groups of four fighters at a time to attack the Japanese formations. Their mission was to shoot at the bombers (usually G4M "Bettys") and then if attacked by fighters, immediately dive away. Then another group of four fighters would attack. You could call this the 'small wing' strategy. If they were chased to below 16,000 ft, they could engage the Japanese fighters. Otherwise they would fly away, extend, then zoom back up as high as they could, claw their way back up to 26,000 ft and do the whole thing all over again.

Meanwhile, if the Japanese pursued the P-40s, they left the bombers vulnerable. They could also become isolated and get bounced while chasing US fighters.

Ultimately, in spite of severe maintenance problems of their own, the difficult tropical conditions, lack of adequate warning, and the extreme inexperience of their pilots, the 49th FG was successful in their mission. They did not dominate the A6M, but they did manage to knock down enough bombers to slow down the raids and stop them for a while. And they didn't lose as many fighters as the Spitfires did. From the article I linked above:

"Over the period March to August 1942, Japanese records reveal nineteen Japanese aircraft were lost in the raids on Darwin. Losses comprised one reconnaissance aircraft, seven fighters and twelve bombers, plus several more damaged. In turn, the 49th Fighter Group lost nineteen fighters, including four pilots, with another eight pilots lost in non-combat-related accidents."

This to me was the role of the P-40 in many Theaters. It was not the ideal fighter for the PTO, for the MTO, for the Russian Front or even the CBI where it did best. But due to in large part to the ability to disengage, as well as reasonably good range / endurance and a knack for causing serious damage to enemy aircraft - and yes toughness and ruggedness (though they too had major mechanical problems in the early days) it proved capable of engaging enemy fighters sufficiently well to put a dent in enemy air activity.
 
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One other point - it wasn't just the AVG which did well against Japanese Army fighters (and later Zeros) in the CBI- they were taken over by the 23rd FG etc. , also equipped with P-40s well into 1944, and continued to manage an uneven record against the IJA forces in Theater.
 
This modification of tactics to suit your adversary's limitations makes me wonder if the IJN could have used a few European and US fighters in their pre-war training. Was there an opportunity pre-Pacific War for the Japanese to capture and restore any P-40s, Hurricanes or Spitfires? Would the Germans have any? The IJAAF bought five Bf 109. It just seems from an intelligence and know your enemy POV, Japan was woefully unprepared for the war they started.
 
The Japanese did have some, the Germans did as well of course.



I think the efficacy of these Allied tactics took a while to solidify. 49th FG was certainly one of the best US units in the PTO (they had numerous aces including Thomas McGuire, Richard Bong, and Robert DeHaven). For such tactics to work took proficiency of the pilots, good leadership and a significant amount of discipline, which was unevenly distributed in Allied units. It also didn't work as well with all aircraft (P-39 squadrons had a considerably less stellar record). There was a lot of give and take and the Japanese did adapt their tactics in various ways. In 1942 and much of 1943 they were still inflicting heavy losses on Allied aircraft.

But gradually the shift from 'Blitzkrieg' to attrition war took their toll. In the example above of the 49th FG at Darwin, the Japanese and Americans both lost 19 aircraft. But the Japanese probably lost 20 pilots and a total of 94 aircrew (12 bomber pilots plus 72 additional bomber crew, 7 fighter pilots and 1 recon aircraft pilot plus 2 crew) whereas the Americans lost 4 pilots in combat, plus another 8 in accidents for a total of 12 pilots. That 94-12 ratio was unsustainable for the Japanese who had a smaller population, far fewer resources and a much slower training output.
 
It's also worth noting, from what I've been reading lately, it seems like the greatest number of losses on Japanese aircraft in the PTO in 1942 and 1943 by far, was due to low level bombing raids by US light and medium bombers such as the B-26, B-25, and A-20, as well as fighter-bomber attacks and also heavy bomber raids from B-17s and B-24s. Large numbers of Japanese fighters and bombers were smashed up on the ground while parked on cramped jungle airfields during swift hit and run air raids.

This is incidentally the same pattern which seems to emerge in the MTO against the Luftwaffe in 1943, per Shores.
 
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