Regarding the true combat performance of the P-38 (and other advanced US fighters) in the PTO from 1942-44

Geoffrey Sinclair · Oct 1, 2025

Overview time, IJNAF losses, exhibit O-46, USSBS Interrogation of Japanese Officials

month	fighter	fighter	dive/torp	bomber	medium	bomber	recon	aircraft	transports	transports	float	planes	flying	boats	trainers	trainers	totals	totals
month	combat	operational	combat	operational	combat	operational	combat	operational	combat	operational	combat	operational	combat	operational	combat	operational	combat	operational
15,311	44	32	19	24	25	18				4	2	11	1	5		18	91	112
15,342	35	34	11	23	11	21				5	15	9		5		21	72	118
15,373	31	38	15	26	40	25				5	13	15		6		27	99	142
15,401	26	60	8	20	5	37				6	13	15	1	4		26	53	168
15,432	36	35	19	10	11	14			3	2	6	10	1	2		24	76	97
15,462	57	47	90	8	21	16				2	38	13	1	1		20	207	107
15,493	137	70	189	12	9	18			2	4	11	14	2			21	350	139
15,523	103	95	49	11	42	10			1	3	34	17		4		22	229	162
15,554	104	61	23	12	46	16			2	3	32	17	11	2		27	218	138
15,585	36	54	13	8	24	14			1	4	39	14		2		27	113	123
15,615	120	57	103	12	25	13			1	4	39	17		2		30	288	135
15,646	84	66	58	12	30	17			3	3	26	13	1	2		30	202	143
15,676	48	70	10	10	18	15			1	4	7	12				30	84	141
15,707	47	64	7	9	23	13	1		1	3	10	13		3		36	89	141
15,738	25	73	38	15	21	16			3	3	13	16	2	4	2	34	104	161
15,766	25	76	32	12	21	12			2	2	20	14	2	3	2	39	104	158
15,797	65	95	13	15	8	27			4	3	15	19	2	3	1	30	108	192
15,827	40	101	23	25	26	36			1	2	25	21			3	45	118	230
15,858	73	114	26	41	28	57				3	9	17	1	5	1	50	138	287
15,888	93	132	30	48	20	51	1	3	2	4	15	32	2	5		40	163	315
15,919	108	113	30	71	15	51		2	3	1	17	24	2	4		33	175	299
15,950	134	125	60	82	30	41			2	4	16	22	3	5		60	245	339
15,980	112	184	40	96	24	78	1	3	2	3	12	36	1	4		55	192	459
16,011	149	155	70	81	52	58		2	4	4	15	32	3	3		61	293	396
16,041	124	130	25	77	20	64			3	3	5	32	1	5		67	178	378
1941/2	861	719	607	188	307	234	0	0	14	49	275	177	18	35	0	323	2,082	1,725
1,943	995	1,362	394	572	288	504	3	10	27	35	172	278	19	44	9	550	1,907	3,355
Total	1,856	2,081	1,001	760	595	738	3	10	41	84	447	455	37	79	9	873	3,989	5,080

A question is the full definitions of combat and operational, given the trainer losses operational can be assumed to be non combat losses, essentially other losses, the question being whether they include losses on operational sorties.

1941 to 1943 the USN claimed 2,029 air victories mostly against Japan, the USAAF in the Far East, Pacific and Alaska 2,511 victories, the RAF, RAAF and RNZAF claimed some as well. US claim total of 4,570 against 3,989 IJN combat losses. Throw in IJAAF losses in Papua New Guinea, discount the heavy bomber claims etc. and the numbers look reasonable and were the best available for a long time.

Adding 618 claimed destroyed on the ground by the FEAF and 63 by Alaska/Pacific forces plus 425 USN claims shifts things, remembering how many IJNAF aircraft went down with their carriers is another factor (250 or so at Midway, USN Carrier aircraft claimed 69 kills for June, 1942 and land based 21), plus the elite IJNAF strike crews went in close which exposed them to even then quite effective USN AA fire. Also important is figures like for WWII Aircraft carrier operations the USN reports action sortie losses as 1,428 to AA, 449 to aircraft and 1,001 to other causes, while action sorties will normally cover strike aircraft fighters have to see combat to be counted, so their losses are undercounted here. Land based operations for the war say action sorties 551 losses to AA, 446 to aircraft, 343 operational.

There are leakages all over the place in the above figures, IJNAF operations in Asia, the RAF, RAAF, RNZAF losses and claims, the IJAAF in New Guinea and so on. Ignore the IJAAF and assume half the reported IJN combat losses were to enemy aircraft in the air and the US is overclaiming 2.4 to 1, assume a third and it is 3.6 to 1, a quarter and it is 4.8 to 1.

The USSBS says the IJNAF lost 1,856 fighters in combat 1941 to 1943, the USN says its land and carrier based aircraft claimed 1,396 of them, assume the IJN fighters were immune to other forces and do the half, third, quarter calculations to have overclaims of 1.5, 2.3 and 3 to 1.

Next comes actually drilling down to the day to day/week to week data.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
The problem here is that GregP and G Geoffrey Sinclair , especially the former, have previously cited the same, profligate victory-to-loss ratios for US aircraft.

Strangely enough I thought posting the data was useful, since there were disagreements on some basics, people can go forward with the information to form opinions with. Unfortunately the 50,000 character limit came into play. I only went to 1943 because the books being discussed are only up to early/mid 1943. Without any Japanese loss data there were no conclusions on ratios, only what some ratios would mean.

Things like the lack of Japanese AA guns meant most allied combat losses were to aircraft and using the RAAF data, even though it includes training units, that combat losses were usually a minority. There are not a lot more allied aircraft available for the Japanese fighters to shoot down. Even with Malaya the RAAF was the next biggest allied air force engaging the Japanese until the RAF/USAAF build up in India, 74 confirmed losses to enemy aircraft and maybe twice that when allocating causes for missing by November 1943. Also note how few Japanese aircraft the RAAF saw from late 1943 onwards, resulting in AA losses catching up.

The other thing is the numbers are small enough it makes them more vulnerable to errors, the FEAF lost 815 aircraft on combat missions in 1942/43, the ETO theatre was taking that sort of loss almost monthly in mid 1944. It is clear logistics made it very hard for both sides to maintain large air forces in the islands north of Australia and New Zealand.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
G Geoffrey Sinclair is more willing to admit to over-claiming, but he, funnily enough, echoes the sentiments of US High Command, that even if over-claiming exaggerated the ratio by 3-to-1—and according to Dunn, it could have been as high as 4.4-to-1—that the Allied aircraft would still have been breaking even (which is what Claringbould and Dunn both suggest to some degree), if not performing better either way...

Like G Geoffrey Sinclair , the US High Command did not realise the full extent of the problem, given how they both guess(ed) an upper limit of a 3-to-1 over-claiming ratio, when it was arguably worse than expected.

Thanks for letting me know your ideas on this subject are so fixed anyone failing to immediately agree gets the above treatment. Would it have helped if I included a 4 to 1 overclaim for the USAAF? I doubt it myself. Guessed huh? How about the 5 to 1 for heavy bombers, with a 1 to 1 fighter to heavy bomber ratio? Instead of echoing the High Command Heavy Bombers as Heavy Fighters ideas? The Luftwaffe 1.5 bombers to 1 fighter is based on aggregating the 1943 8th Air Force raids, looking at multiple reports of losses and causes, the Luftwaffe had better average fighter firepower versus Japanese, the USAAF tighter and larger bomber formations. Such sources have been much scarcer for the Japanese.

I happen to believe the Air Force internal accounting documents are overall accurate, with the inevitable errors given the amount of information and the occasional deliberate error, just like the claims of enemy aircraft shot down.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
On that note, this forum appears to be less active recently; it's as much in decline as is its subject matter.

Quite, I wonder why?

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

Shortround6 said:
The overclaiming bit many air forces in the butt and badly.
Everybody thought they could estimate the enemy's production and they tried to calculate, based on losses, when the enemy would run out of aircraft. BoB was the famous example of this and overclaiming by the Luftwaffe. Americans thought for months that the B-17s and B-24s were shooting down many more fighters than the were and soon the Luftwaffe would run out of fighters and the losses of the unescorted B-17s and B-24s would drop to acceptable levels without escort fighters.
I don't know what was going on in the Pacific but it might have been WW I all over again. One more push and the enemy will collapse and victory will be ours!
Overclaiming was not limited to aircraft. Japanese Navy thought they had destroyed over 400 Allied subs so they were overclaiming by 8 or 9 to 1.
Now when you are sinking allied/American subs so easily why improve your anti-sub sensors, weapons or tactics?

Yes I agree, it was a major problem in wartime. Important decisions are made on the basis of estimates of enemy losses. And it seemed to be particularly bad for the Imperial Japanese Army in China / India / Burma. They were moving units around on the basis of thinking that they had won major victories in 1943-44 in some cases where they had barely accomplished anything.

IJN, especially after the tipping point in 1942, routinely thought they sunk carriers with their aircraft when they may have only damaged a destroyer or an oiler.

Needless to say the US and British and Aussies had similar problems, but this is one of those things that gradually seemed to get a bit better for the Allies (like with the widespread introduction of gun cameras).

It's worth noting though that gun camera footage alone of course, doesn't solve the problem. Many aircraft can hit the same enemy target, which may or may not actually go down as a result. Gun camera footage which shows the target actually being destroyed - wing blown off, pilot bailing out etc., is exceedingly rare. Even an explosion doesn't mean the enemy aircraft is necessarily going down, and 3 or 4 planes might be shooting at (and have footage of) the same aircraft even if it does go down.

Thumpalumpacus · Oct 1, 2025

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Force-landings do usually come about as a result of damage sustained during combat, normally by enemy fire, correct? Operational losses would more so apply to things like engine troubles, faulty landing gear preventing a smooth, convenient landing, which could have been brought about by such things as faulty manufacturing, design problems, non-combat related causes in general, wouldn't they?

Why are you making this distinction without a difference? So far as I know, a forced landing is a forced landing is a forced landing, whether the cause be enemy action, mechanical difficulty, airframe damage (which is not always related to enemy action) and so on. You asked me about forced landings. If you wanted to know about forced landings caused by enemy action, then you should have asked that clearly.

To answer: if enemy bullets force you down, that may be a forced landing, or it may be a shoot-down, depending on the state of your airplane when it comes to a stop.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Wouldn't force-landings not be operational losses, then, especially if they result from damage sustained in combat? Can operational losses arise, directly and unambiguously, from damage in combat? Do you consider ditching as a result of combat damage to also be operational losses?

In order, not necessarily, yes, and yes.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
A separate thread on this topic might just come in handy. And regardless, force-landings still suggest that said aircraft were outfought by their opponents in the air.

Not if they are not caused by combat. You keep trying to slide that assumption into the discussion, which makes this a form of circular reasoning or question-begging.

By the way, there are a couple of threads on the topic.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
The problem here is that GregP and G Geoffrey Sinclair , especially the former, have previously cited the same, profligate victory-to-loss ratios for US aircraft. G Geoffrey Sinclair is more willing to admit to over-claiming, but he, funnily enough, echoes the sentiments of US High Command, that even if over-claiming exaggerated the ratio by 3-to-1—and according to Dunn, it could have been as high as 4.4-to-1—that the Allied aircraft would still have been breaking even (which is what Claringbould and Dunn both suggest to some degree), if not performing better either way...

Ask them, then. I don't and won't answer for the opinions of others.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Fact? Where did I state that additional weight only affects speed?

You didn't. What you did do is insinuate that the only characteristic I took into account was speed. That necessarily implies that that is your focus. It's a pity you didn't see fit to clarify that even as you mischaracterized my stance.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I don't disagree with your point that more power is needed with additional weight, given that I mentioned the A7M in my little hypothetical. It's just that aircraft, especially manoeuvrable aircraft with relatively lower wing loadings like the A6M, A7M, Ki-43 and the Ki-61 to some degree, need not have firepower, climb, and level speed equivalent or superior to their opponents to hold their own against them in combat. The A6M's record against the Corsair and F6F, especially in 1943, when experienced Japanese pilots were still in sizable numbers, is evidence of this. This implies less weight, and consequently, less horsepower required.

If you remember the context, this part of the discussion is about post-war service of Japanese airframes. It's obvious they would need to gain weight in order to stay viable. Adding that weight without adding more power is not going to give you a top-tier fighter. Unfortunately, the Japanese engine industry was at the time digging out from the rubble, which puts paid to the idea of post-war Zeroes and so on.

It's baffling why you can't simply accept such a glaringly obvious point.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

Thumpalumpacus said:
While modern digital aids may well help sort modern combats out for future historians, I'm of the opinion that regarding the air wars from WWI to Vietnam, we will always have a level of murk and imprecision. I don't get vexed about it because "I don't know" is a very simple and honest statement. I wish people were willing to admit as much.

There is definitely some degree of this. For example, in Claringbould's sources, it's often hard to be sure which unit (and thus, which aircraft type) shot down a given enemy aircraft. Same with Shores - in the Med there were huge air battles on some days, like during 2nd El Alamein, during the destruction of Pantelleria, the invasions of Sicily and Italy, and at Anzio, where there were huge numbers of Allied aircraft especially, all making claims. The enemy took losses, but we don't know if these were due to RAF, SAAF, RAAF, USAAF, or FAA units in some cases. Due to bombers or fighters, or sometimes, just due to the ubiquitous 'operational losses' from maintenance, weather, navigation, pilot error or illness, etc. etc. We know how many Allied aircraft were shot, 'failed to return', force landed etc., but we don't know if it were pilots from the German Fw 190 or Bf 109, or the Italian MC 202 or MC 205 units that got them. Or flak.

You can, however, narrow it down quite a bit. We may not know on a given day whether it was P-38s, P-39s, P-40s, or defensive gunners on B-17s and A-20s which actually shot down 5 x A6Ms, but we can say that 5 were lost, and not 27 as the Allies claimed. Conversely, we don't know for sure if the Ki-43s or the A6Ms shot down the 2 P-38s and 1 P-40 in the same battle, but we do know that these three Allied fighters were lost, and not 25 as the Japanese claimed.

So there is still Fog of War, a level of Murk as you put it, but I don't think it's 90% of the data obscured that way, it's probably more like 5-10% maybe slightly more depending on the time frame and the Theater. I think we can clarify things quite a bit compared to when we were just going by the 'confirmed' victory tallies, or even worse, accepting 'confirmed' victory numbers from one side but disregarding the other, as is often done for example with the Soviets, Italians and Japanese.

We also do incidentally know for what periods (and places) we have records and where we don't, so that's not quite so vague or amorphous as has been implied a few times.

GregP · Oct 1, 2025

Very difficult to believe 3 or 4 aircraft can be shooting at the same target since they fought in pairs with one shooter and one wingman, and flew in flights of four aircraft just before combat was joined.

It is easy to think of two pairs shooting at the same target occasionally, but that means two shooters in real life, not four, and if more than 2 pairs are shooting at the same target, I think a mid-air collision is more than somewhat likely as they converge. I'm sure two pairs shot at the same target occasionally, but not often ... probably more toward the end of the war when we have 1,000 bombers escorted by 700 fighters and not many targets in the area. After a few mid-airs, I bet they figured out rapidly not to do that and adjusted accordingly.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

Juha3 said:
Overclaiming varied between air forces but also inside a specific air force, Commands, formations and units. In the end it was up to an individual pilot. At least up to 1942 the LW claims were generally more accurate than those of British Commonwealth. But sometimes LW pilots overclaimed wildy, one example was on 27 Sept 1940 over SW England. The LW lost 10 Bf 110s plus one 40 % damages, JG 2, which is one of the JGs with reputation of overclaiming more than the average within the Jagdfliegerverbände, claimed 3 Spitfires and ZG 26 8 Spitfires. No Spitfires were shot down, one Hurricane crash landed but the plane repairable. One Spit was hit by a couple mg bullets which were noticed only after landing, another by a 20 mm shell into a mainplane, landed safely to its base. The pilot did not see the attacker but that happened after he had a combat with several Bf 109s very late in the combat so the attacker was probably a Bf 109 pilot. One Spitfire was lost in a head-on collision with a Bf 110 but its pilot made no claim because he became a PoW.

The main reason why the Intelligence Service of the LW was so out of the touch of reality during the BoB was that it badly underestimated the fighter production in the UK and the effectiveness of the British a/c repair organisation. Of course the overclaiming of LW pilots made things even worse.

The differences in the accuracy of claims between different units became apparent, for example, in a study by a US researcher of the P-38 losses, an exceptionally easily identifiable aircraft, in North Africa. The results did not surprise me too much. The claims of the pilots of JG 51 were the most accurate at 76% and those of JG 2 the least accurate at 22.5%. JG 27, JG 53 and JG 77 were in the middle in that order, between 66.7 - 63.6%. So generally German claims were accurate, those of JG 51 very accurate but but those of JG 2 rather lousy.

I think you are overly generous to the German rates of overclaiming, though the devil comes down to the details. Are we counting immediately destroyed only? Crash-landings that didn't make it to base? Crash landings that did make it to base but were written off? etc. As long as the same standard is applied to both sides, it's not such a big deal. But that's not always the case, some people put their thumbs on the scale a bit.

In his Black Cross / Red Star series, Christer Bergstrom estimated Luftwaffe fighter group's overclaiming as between 3-1 and 2.5-1 depending on the specific period. And if anything I think he's a little extra generous to the Luftwaffe. In the same books Soviet claims seem to be from 5-1 to 3-1. Bad, but not as bad as you might assume based on a lot of people's shorthand. Admittedly I've only got two of the books in this series, I think for 1942-43.

There is a thread on here where somebody posted all the claims and losses for Oct 1942 during the 2nd Battle of El Alamein, the Axis fighter units overclaimed about 3-1, not counting flak and bomber / defensive gunner claims. I checked my copies of the two Shores books quoted here and the numbers add up.

In summary, in 19 days of air combat during that month, the German fighter pilots claimed 107 and the Italians 131 Allied aircraft, for a total of 238 'confirmed' victories. The British fighter units claimed 105 and the Americans 29, for a total of 134 'confirmed' victories.

The actual losses were 61 Allied aircraft shot down (57 fighters and 4 bombers)=61 shot down, and 16 crash landed, for 77 total; and the Axis lost 60 shot down (46 fighters and 14 bombers), plus 17 crash landed, also for a total of 77. Axis fighter loses were 41 x Bf 109 and 18 x MC 202, 2 CR 42 and 11 Ju 8, pus 3 other bombers. Allied losses were 11 Spitfires, 41 Kittyhawks and 19 Hurricanes, plus 5 bombers.

Axis units claimed a total of 238 for 77 actually lost (including forced landings) for a ratio of 3.09-1
Allied units claimed a total of 134 vs 77 actually lost (including forced landings) for a ratio of 1.74-1

So in this period the Axis units overclaimed much more. If you go through that book checking losses, German overclaiming ranged from around 2-1 and 3-1, Italians slightly more, RAF started out around 4 or 5-1, and dropped to closer to 2-1 by the end of 1942, though it varied widely (bigger air battles usually meant more overclaiming).

You could blame this ratio on the Italians, but their rates do not seem to be wildly worse than the Germans overall, and the MC 202s particularly did seem to actually destroy a lot of Allied fighters. They just usually didn't fly as often because they had less fuel.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

special ed said:
May I ask who gets credit for the victory today when a wreck is found downed in the jungle or in the sea? Was the pilot at the time posted as missing?

Victory credits are a wartime matter. Actual losses are kind of a separate thing. If you shot at an enemy aircraft and it didn't make it back to base, I think that counts as 'shot down'.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

GregP said:
Very difficult to believe 3 or 4 aircraft can be shooting at the same target since they fought in pairs with one shooter and one wingman, and flew in flights of four aircraft just before combat was joined.

It is easy to think of two pairs shooting at the same target occasionally, but that means two shooters in real life, not four, and if more than 2 pairs are shooting at the same target, I think a mid-air collision is more than somewhat likely as they converge. I'm sure two pairs shot at the same target occasionally, but not often ... probably more toward the end of the war when we have 1,000 bombers escorted by 700 fighters and not many targets in the area. After a few mid-airs, I bet they figured out rapidly not to do that and adjusted accordingly.

It's not so hard for me to believe because many pilots of all air forces describe this happening, often intentionally. That is one reason why some units counted shared victories. It was also sometimes the case that a wing-leader would allow their wingman to attack a damaged target so as to get a 'kill'. Or so that they themselves could save ammunition for a possible additional encounter.

It's also not so hard for me to believe when you realize that even seriously damaged aircraft can often take several minutes or longer to actually crash (or for the crew to bail out etc.) and might get seen by multiple enemy fighters.

If Allied Fighter 1 shoot at an aircraft and causes crippling damage, then veers away as he sees that aircraft descending toward a cloud, but then 2 minutes later Allied fighter 2 sees the same enemy plane (perhaps easier to spot now due to a plume of smoke, hydraulic fluid, leaking fuel, leaking oil etc. etc.) and then shoots at it, and later sees it going down... I think it's pretty easy to understand. Keep in mind fighters often only saw each other at any kind of close distance for a fraction of a second. A long leisurely observation of the ultimate fate of enemy aircraft was rarely possible (or safe).

If you are talking about conditions like often seen in the South Pacific where clouds, fog, mist and rain often obscure the battle area (or parts of it) at random intervals, and / or aircraft can escape into these weather features but sometimes only temporarily, it is again not too hard for me to understand. There were specific cases for example where a heavily damaged US figther or bomber was trying to get home to a friendly base, and was attacked multiple times by different groups of aircraft, only to escape in the nick of time into a cloud, but the attacked again as it came into the open once more. In each case claims were made. The Americans and Aussies also did the same thing on occasion.

Intentional overclaiming seems to be fairly rare. It was sometimes the subject of prosecution - there was a staffel of JG.27 which got prosecuted for this in North Africa IIRC. There were some JAAF units and individual pilots also investigated for it in Burma and China as I recall. Many of the authors of these sources do point it out where it seems particularly egregious, sometimes seemingly unfairly, sometimes with justification. I tend to assume honest mistakes.

Juha3 · Oct 1, 2025

Steamed_Banana said:
I think you are overly generous to the German rates of overclaiming, though the devil comes down to the details. Are we counting immediately destroyed only? Crash-landings that didn't make it to base? Crash landings that did make it to base but were written off? etc. As long as the same standard is applied to both sides, it's not such a big deal. But that's not always the case, some people put their thumbs on the scale a bit.

In his Black Cross / Red Star series, Christer Bergstrom estimated Luftwaffe fighter group's overclaiming as between 3-1 and 2.5-1 depending on the specific period. And if anything I think he's a little extra generous to the Luftwaffe. In the same books Soviet claims seem to be from 5-1 to 3-1. Bad, but not as bad as you might assume based on a lot of people's shorthand. Admittedly I've only got two of the books in this series, I think for 1942-43.

There is a thread on here where somebody posted all the claims and losses for Oct 1942 during the 2nd Battle of El Alamein, the Axis fighter units overclaimed about 3-1, not counting flak and bomber / defensive gunner claims. I checked my copies of the two Shores books quoted here and the numbers add up.

In summary, in 19 days of air combat during that month, the German fighter pilots claimed 107 and the Italians 131 Allied aircraft, for a total of 238 'confirmed' victories. The British fighter units claimed 105 and the Americans 29, for a total of 134 'confirmed' victories.

The actual losses were 61 Allied aircraft shot down (57 fighters and 4 bombers)=61 shot down, and 16 crash landed, for 77 total; and the Axis lost 60 shot down (46 fighters and 14 bombers), plus 17 crash landed, also for a total of 77. Axis fighter loses were 41 x Bf 109 and 18 x MC 202, 2 CR 42 and 11 Ju 8, pus 3 other bombers. Allied losses were 11 Spitfires, 41 Kittyhawks and 19 Hurricanes, plus 5 bombers.

Axis units claimed a total of 238 for 77 actually lost (including forced landings) for a ratio of 3.09-1
Allied units claimed a total of 134 vs 77 actually lost (including forced landings) for a ratio of 1.74-1

So in this period the Axis units overclaimed much more. If you go through that book checking losses, German overclaiming ranged from around 2-1 and 3-1, Italians slightly more, RAF started out around 4 or 5-1, and dropped to closer to 2-1 by the end of 1942, though it varied widely (bigger air battles usually meant more overclaiming).

You could blame this ratio on the Italians, but their rates do not seem to be wildly worse than the Germans overall, and the MC 202s particularly did seem to actually destroy a lot of Allied fighters. They just usually didn't fly as often because they had less fuel.

It was not my stydy but Mark J. Reardon's. he also noted that in February and March 43 the accuracy percentages dipped well below 40 percent. Those percentages in my earlier message covered the whole timespan of the study, from 21 Nov 1942 to 6 May 1943. So you can pick a shorter timespan and get different percentages, well below 40 % may well be near 33 % i.e. 3-1.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

Juha3 said:
It was not my stydy but Mark J. Reardon's. he also noted that in February and March 43 the accuracy percentages dipped well below 40 percent. Those percentages in my earlier message covered the whole timespan of the study, from 21 Nov 1942 to 6 May 1943. So you can pick a shorter timespan and get different percentages, well below 40 % may well be near 33 % i.e. 3-1.

Ah, forgive me. My math skills are weaker than a malaria + dysentery afflicted pilot in 110 degree heat on day 119 of continuous combat flying, due to attending US public schools in a big city, alas... (where weather conditions are actually fairly similar to Port Moresby)

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

Juha3 said:
The SU was a very bureaucratic state and produced an immense amount of documents. There are gaps in the wartime documentary collections, but mostly from the summer of 1941 to autumn and the summer of 1942.

The VVS, like all military organizations, kept records of their assets, such as airplanes and their engines, and new ones could not be gotten simply by asking that the higher authority would send X new planes, you also had to tell what had happened to the previous ones. And you couldn't put a lot of combat losses to the account of accidents, because then it was easy to be accused of sabotage, which could have fatal consequences, or of assigning pilots to tasks that were too demanding compared to their training or experience. Indeed, the Soviet unit commander had to give that kind of assurance when informing losses to higher level at least since 1943, probably earlier.

So it did not work to inform that your unit lost 3 planes and two pilots during a combat mission and then ask 12 planes and 10 pilots as replacements. And if you asked too few replacements and when you were ordered to sent 12 fighters to escort an Il-2 strike and you had only four fighters left, that is a situation that has grave consequences for you, maybe it would be best to shoot yourself in the head or try to defect to the enemy. The result would not be a nice chat over a cup of tea with the interrogators.

Exactly. Armies even of totalitarian nations needed to know how much equipment and how many personnel they were losing. The Soviets were particularly focused on loss rates by type, and also on comparative performance advantages of different types, which is why we have their turn time test data and things like average number of missions per loss for different aircraft types.

They also had fairly strict rules on verifying enemy aircraft losses, though they still overclaimed. One rule, I am not sure how rigidly enforced, was for friendly ground forces to recover the identity plate of downed enemy aircraft. They did quite a large number of those...

In general, in circumstances where enemy aircraft / wrecks could be recovered, such as for example in an air battle over your own base in wide open desert, accuracy could be a fair bit higher, for all armies. In a place like the Solomons or New Guinea, even if an aircraft crashed on land rather than the water, and even if it crashed only a kilometer or two from your base in some cases, it still might not be found for 40-50 years, if ever.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I have my ways of tracking down out-of-print books. I will check all these titles out later.

You can still find them. Vol III is probably the most useful of the Bloody Shambles series. It's not as good as MAW with the summaries at the end of each day's records, but he does have a lot of valuable information in there. It's just a little trickier and more time consuming to dig out and quantify in aggregate.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I generally agree with all these points. Indeed, it's most likely the case that over-claiming often wasn't intentional, though that didn't prevent it from being convenient for those in charge, especially in more repressive countries like Japan and the USSR.

As noted previously, even the IJA and IJN and the Soviets wanted to know how many planes they lost and how many enemy planes they actually got.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Claringbould largely attributes the gradual and non-dramatic increase in success of the Corsair in combat against the A6M to a decline in skilled and experienced Japanese pilots as a result of attrition, and the consequent shortening and slackening of training to compensate for these losses; general consensus would already agree with this explanation to some degree. This almost certainly applies to other Allied and Japanese fighter aircraft, the F6F in particular. Indeed, a handful of aerial battles covered at the end of Claringbould's book on the matter appear to have ended with Zeros sustaining increasing losses against the Corsair. The question now concerns the extent to which inexperience a factor in Japanese losses, and the composition of veterans and fresh replacements, especially in later engagements with aircraft like the Hellcat, some of which looked to have been appallingly lopsided in the latter's favour, even factoring in losses recorded by the Japanese.

Claringbould, like all of these authors, has his own preferences, biases and point of view. I think his conclusions are less valuable than the data. And as much as I applaud his work (this guy is incredibly prolific lately) I am seriously looking forward to someone else going through these same records (more on this in a second) and finding and pointing up any errors or subtle emphasis he may have made.

As for the inexperienced Axis pilots and aircrew, this becomes true and very real at some point, but I think it gets exaggerated a lot as an excuse. It is of course, very hard to quantify how many skilled and trained pilots based on currently available data. Someone could do a study as to the average age, years of experience, and length of training of pilots in different units over time, that data is probably available.

For the Japanese, that is a major problem by later in 1944 - Leyte Gulf was in Oct 1944, and by then there were much fewer experienced pilots. But the Corsair was definitely active still at the hard part before the real momentum shift after the tipping point, and Hellcat was involved when the Japanese still had plenty of good pilots around, as the Allied forces found out a couple of times over and around Rabaul.

Defining when the tipping point for this actually was is worth further investigation, but I don't think it was in 1943. At least not universally.

I also think in general, this is something which needs to be applied consistently but usually isn't. This argument gets brought up every time Allied victories are discussed, but many of the same people almost completely disregard the disadvantages suffered by the Allied pilots in the early war when the Axis air forces were making their reputations. Many of the Allied units fighting around New Guinea for example had almost no time on type or things like gunnery training. IIRC the 49th FG only had about 5% experienced pilots and about the same percentage trained on the aircraft they were going to fly into combat. They were very lucky that their CO was experienced.

So many of the Soviet losses in the early war were of biplanes, barely 300 mph I-16s, antiquated SB bombers, and new types (MiG-3, LaGG-3, Yak-1) that had not been fully developed either at the design or production level. And yet, we praise the Luftwaffe pilots all their high scores... we praise the Japanese aces who scored so many victories over I-153s, I-16s, Hawk II and III, P-26s, Martin B-10s and SBs, B-18s, Buffalos, Curtiss Hawks, P-35s, early mark Hurricanes etc. in places like China, Burma, Malaya, Philippines, when they often had overhwelming numerical superiority and a great deal of combat experience.

Not to say the Luftwaffe, Finnish Ilmavoimat, IJN and IJA, and yes the Italian Regia Aeronautica didn't also achieve astonishing success against much better aircraft flown by much more experienced pilots and aircrew, because they certainly did. But the same is true on both sides. It's a mix of circumstances on both sides. The pilot who scored a lot of real victories in say mid 1942 - mid 1943 is more impressive to me than the pilot who scored a lot in 1940-41 (with the exception of the Battle of Britain and Battle of France) or in later 1944-45.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
WWII aviation, if not WWII as a whole, is often hyped up as this intense technological arms race, with terms like "horsepower race" being thrown around quite commonly. Later generation WWII fighters—with the exception of novel, and rather experimental, jet and rocket fighters—are often treated as being significantly (i.e. to a noticeable, non-negligible degree) better, with any issues they may experienced attributed to such things as "operational losses", "teething issues", and some combination of "inexperience" and 'incorrect tactics'. Sometimes the merits of the earlier aircraft of the war are acknowledged, but they are still often treated as considerably inferior; the constant references to dubious and excessive "victory"-to-loss ratios are emblematic of this problem.

I agree with your main point - this is also true for many, many other fields of history. But it's also true that things like 'teething issues' and bad tactics are very real. The Axis, let's not forget, got to practice a lot in places like Manchuria and in the Spanish Civil War, and hone their tactics and fine tune some of their machines (and inform new designs) from that experience. That really matters a lot. There is a lead time which varies a lot by type, (sometimes a few weeks, sometimes years) before they became really viable. And the wider the leap being made the longer that lead time, on average (though it varies widely).

JoblinTheGoblin said:
All this makes me wonder, how well did the P-38 (and P-47) compare to the P-40 (and P-39), and likewise, the F6F and F4U to the F4F, especially when Japanese reports are considered? The 2nd-generation Allied (in this case, US) would have to perform noticeably better than their older counterparts, say, 1.5:1 against 1.1:1 or similar, otherwise, I don't think that they succeeded in justifying themselves, given their likely higher costs and technical complexity.

Worthy question, but i think you are maybe a bit too reductive here.... there were other reasons why even early versions of some of the newer, better planes were more useful.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I also remain sceptical about the performance of the P-38; the first part of Rick Dunn's examination of the P-38's record doesn't seem too negative, though the P-38 does not appear too dominant, with the enemy losing perhaps one additional airframe (which could potentially have been recovered later) in encounters with it, if even that. Both the second part of this examination and Claringbould's book on the Bougainville air campaign are harrowing in comparison, with numerous engagements where it seems that Zeros were able to shoot down P-38s with only moderate damage at best, certainly no losses. The most shocking encounter, and it did legitimately shock me when I read it, took place on November 7, with four P-38s shot down by defending A6Ms over Rabaul without any loss to their own despite massive over-claiming on the part of the P-38 pilots. Even if the P-38 was unable to exercise its advantages in the Rabaul-Solomons area as it could over New Guinea, and it should be noted that it was frequently utilised in low-altitude strafing runs in the former, given its superior speed, especially its climb, and its superior firepower, this remains a grisly result for the famed Lightning. The information Claringbould's Pacific Profiles book on the P-38 supposedly suggests a 1:1 loss ratio against Japanese aircraft (overall?) if that Modelling Madness review is to be believed.

They had a couple of bad days, and I tink this did come down to "teething issues" which were extensive for the P-38, and bad tactics.

To understand the advantages of the newer more expensive planes, I think we have to go beyond Tactical benefits, even though those do matter, and also consider Strategic or Operational merits.

Early P-38s were very hard to fly, they had serious electrical problems, rolled and turned poorly, could not safely dive at high speeds due to serious compressibility problems, could not operate at very high altitudes (partly due to totally inadequate heating systems) etc. etc. A few pilots figured out how to use them really well, like Bong and McGuire. One P-38 Ace who also did well flying P-40s, Robert DeHaven, said the following:

"If you flew wisely, the P-40 was a very capable aircraft. [It] could outturn a P-38, a fact that some pilots didn't realize when they made the transition between the two aircraft. [...] The real problem with it was lack of range. As we pushed the Japanese back, P-40 pilots were slowly left out of the war. So when I moved to P-38s, an excellent aircraft, I did not [believe] that the P-40 was an inferior fighter, but because I knew the P-38 would allow us to reach the enemy. I was a fighter pilot and that was what I was supposed to do."

How the P-38 was in fact better
I bolded the key bit. The P-38 had the range that P-40 didn't have and the P-39 definitely didn't have. In South Pacific Air War Vol 6, which as i noted, I just read so it's fresh in my mind, about half of the big Allied bombing missions were escorted only by P-38s. Claringbould noted that the P-40s could reach some of these targets (like Lae) but they did not have enough fuel to properly form up with all the bomber units, a major challenge as numerous bomber squadrons from multiple bases would ideally try to join together on raids (for safety). But the P-38s did. So the P-38 was an asset, even if it was roughly the same in air combat as a P-40, or only marginally better in early 1943, it was already something you could use at a much greater distance. Maybe something like 500 miles instead of 200. P-38 could also be used to escort heavy bombers like B-24s and B-17s at 20,000+ feet, which a P-40 really couldn't do. So that's another major Strategic benefit (and a major reason why USAAF liked P-38s better than P-40s).

One other thing we can do to kind of suss out one type from another is to look at the claims. We know there was overclaiming but we also don't have any reason to believe pilots of one type overclaimed more than pilots of another type in the same service branch. So P-38 pilots made 1700 claims in the Pacific Theater. P-40 pilots made 660 claims in the PTO. P-39 pilots made 288. That tells us something. We also had one P-39 Ace in the PTO, about thirty flying P-40s in the PTO, and about 35 flying the P-38. we had 58 Wildcat aces, about 300 in the Hellcat, and 123 in the Corsair. (Also worth noting that P-40s and P-39s were no longer in the fight very much after 1943, mainly due to range limitations)

However, the early P-38s were not ideal escort fighters. They had advantages over the A6M and Ki-43, but only in a fairly narrow band of speed and altitude. At around 16-25,000 ft, they were significantly faster and could hit and run by using high-speed shallow climbs, but down lower their advantage was less. These were early P-38s so diving away from combat was a tricky and very risky business. When they didn't follow these rules they took losses. It's kind of amazing that on balance, they actually did fairly well, but due to flying more in their ideal zone, i.e. at middling-high altitude, which sometimes meant they didn't escort the bombers so well. This was also, interestingly, true for Bf 109s in the Mediterranean Theater.

How the Hellcat and Corsair were better
The Wildcat, in air to air combat, actually held it's own against both A6M and Ki-43. That is a very interesting fact that the hard data shows us in these revisionist histories. They even had a slight edge, it seems, certainly in campaigns like Guadalcanal. But they also had a lot of limitations. The biggest one which was especially damning for a carrier fighter was it's terrible rate of climb. The F4F-3 had a mediocre rate of climb around 2,200 feet per minute. But only 285 of those were built. The much more ubiquitous F4F-4 Wildcat climbed somewhere between 1600 ft per minute to around 1800 ft per minute. Which is really bad! This never really got alleviated until the FM-2 arrived in 1944. The F4F-4 also carried 240 rounds of ammunition for it's guns. The poor climb rate meant that Wildcat combat air patrol often failed to intercept enemy IJN strikes during several major carrier battles in the Pacific War. The limited ammunition meant they often ran out of bullets while these crucial carrier battles were still going on.

The early F4U had a rate of climb orf about 2,900 fpm and the F6F, which became the main USN carrier fighter, climbed at 3,250 fpm. This may not have been as good as some planes, but it was almost twice as good as the F4F. The F6F carried 400 rounds for it's six heavy machine guns, the F4U carried 375-400. Much better again. Range was also a bit better, about 10-20% more than the Wildcat.

So aside from being 60-70 mph faster right out the gate, both of these newer types had much more Strategic value than the earlier US carrier fighter (Wildcat) both for combat air patrol and for flying on strikes. This also applied to the FAA since the Wildcat / Martlet was arguably their best carrier fighter too and they also ended up uprgading to the Hellcat and Corsair, albeit they got them too late. The F4U in particular also turned out to be a very effective fighter-bomber, carrying a pretty heavy bomb load of around 2,000 (later versions carried more) vs about 200-500 lbs for a Wildcat, and it could bomb pretty accurately. This improved the value of the Corsair so much that it contributed to the phasing-out of the problematic SB2C "Helldiver" carrier dive bomber.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I would agree with you here, though I will that add that it's to be expected, but still quite annoying nonetheless, that the ETO and MTO were the very first to receive this level of attention, and that's not to speak of the amount of attention late-war German aircraft receive compared to late-war Japanese fighters, especially in terms of specifications, and correcting them for any wartime deficiencies in resources and in manufacturing. The late-war Japanese fighters usually have the same, tired Francillon figures ascribed to them, often with little to no context behind them.

Dunn's article claims otherwise, at least in the case of the Spitfire VIII. He actually states that the Merlin-powered P-51s (and the P-38s) performed better in fighter sweeps than the Spitfire over Burma and India, but I currently don't have any sources on hand comparing Merlin P-51 and Ki-43 losses in a similarly fair and comprehensive approach to that of Claringbould's and Dunn's works.

Read Shores Bloody Shambles III I think it will be a revelation on this, and many other things. It does not make the Ki-43 look bad by any stretch, mind you, but it's pretty clear that the Spit VIII offered an advantage in combat. It also had about twice the range of a Spit V or any mark Hurricane, and much better altitude performance. So here again, Strategic advantages. That said, the Spit VIII did not have anywhere near the range of the P-51B/C/D or the P-38 and probably not the P-47 depending on subtype and mission profile. So those had a bit more Strategic advantage.

I havent' added up all the numbers but it definitely looks like the Spit VIII shot down considerably more Ki-43s in Burma / India than they lost, and the JAAF pilots themselves discussed this, Shores quotes them in the book. As do some other authors.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
According to Claringbould, the A6M was still quite competent in combat against the Corsair around the Rabaul-Solomons area in 1943, with a roughly 1.5:1 loss-to-loss ratio in a particular engagement over the Russell Islands on May 13, 1943, in the former's favour, with three pilots lost and one force-landing, against two pilots missing, two ditched air-frames and two force-landings. It is not a favourable picture for the Corsair here.

Sure but that's just one day, or am I missing something? What's the total for the month?

JoblinTheGoblin said:
From what I've read, many engagements through 1943-44 suggest roughly even ratios for the fighter aircraft involved, sometimes even in the Zero's or Oscar's favour, though this balance had noticeably shifted by mid-1944. The increasing influx of fresher, less experienced pilots did contribute to this change in circumstances, however, perhaps more than most people would think or would like.

The Spitfire VIII did appear to have a marginal advantage to some degree, perhaps 1.5:1 to 2:1 in terms of losses, at least according to Dunn. Not terrible, but not crushing either. I suppose that, at the very least, this Spitfire model had proven itself as a marked improvement over the Ki-43. Still, the Ki-43 wasn't completely outclassed at altitudes below 20,000 feet (~6000m), where much of the fighting took place. Accounts from both sides, as provided by Dunn, speak of this. Supposedly, however, the Spitfire VIII's claims/victory(?)-to-loss ratio was only >1:1 in the theatre, at least according to a US Navy report from June 1944, though this ratio is inclusive of all Japanese aircraft types besides just fighters alone. Taking into consideration over-claiming, Dunn asserts that the Spitfire actually had a negative ratio until then. I'm not entirely sure if that's the case, and the engagements between the Spitfire and the Ki-43, as he describes, don't suggest such an appalling record...

2-1 is really good (bad for the losing side) if your are flying and being engaged frequently. A squadron is only 10-20 aircraft, depending on the unit.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I'm coming around to your perspective, though I remain of the opinion that such a path is murky, unclear, and, at this stage, still rather disappointing, especially given that so many relevant records have been
lost to time, and so many misconceptions and speculation are, and will remain, abound.

Consider this though. Guys like Shores, Bergstrom, Claringbould etc. have done the hard work now of finding these records. Unless they somehow locked down copyright or access (which I doubt but you never know these days) we should likely see many more similar works. I know these have been popular and as the significance increasingly (finally) occurs to people, more and more I think interest is growing. So hopefully we will see more and better analysis and data.

Juha3 · Oct 1, 2025

Steamed_Banana said:
Exactly. Armies even of totalitarian nations needed to know how much equipment and how many personnel they were losing. The Soviets were particularly focused on loss rates by type, and also on comparative performance advantages of different types, which is why we have their turn time test data and things like average number of missions per loss for different aircraft types.

They also had fairly strict rules on verifying enemy aircraft losses, though they still overclaimed. One rule, I am not sure how rigidly enforced, was for friendly ground forces to recover the identity plate of downed enemy aircraft. They did quite a large number of those...

In general, in circumstances where enemy aircraft / wrecks could be recovered, such as for example in an air battle over your own base in wide open desert, accuracy could be a fair bit higher, for all armies. In a place like the Solomons or New Guinea, even if an aircraft crashed on land rather than the water, and even if it crashed only a kilometer or two from your base in some cases, it still might not be found for 40-50 years, if ever.

They had strict criteria but those were not strictly followed. As some Russian researchers had noticed, claims acceptance was fairly relaxed as a compensation of strict discipline, poor living conditions and very cruel combat environment, especially early in the war. They had already overclaimed rather wildly during the Nomonhan/Khalkhin-Gol Incident during the Summer of 1939 and against the Finns during the Winter 1939/40. In 1944 their claiming seems to be much more accurate. Soviets learned much from Germans, as they said: "Germans are good but harsh teachers".

Yes, VVS-KA did not like the idea of its fighters combating deep into enemy territory up to say 1944. Later part of 1944 the formed a few elite Fighter Regiments for free hunting behind enemy lines. Their planes were equipped with gun cameras as an extra measurement for claim accuracy. How much that was because of general paranoid of the Stalinist society and how much because of the state was paying a substantial reward (1,000 rubles) for confirmed kills, I don't know.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 1, 2025

Juha3 said:
They had strict criteria but those were not strictly followed. As some Russian researchers had noticed, claims acceptance was fairly relaxed as a compensation of strict discipline, poor living conditions and very cruel combat environment, especially early in the war. They had already overclaimed rather wildly during the Nomonhan/Khalkhin-Gol Incident during the Summer of 1939 and against the Finns during the Winter 1939/40. In 1944 their claiming seems to be much more accurate. Soviets learned much from Germans, as they said: "Germans are good but harsh teachers".

Yes, VVS-KA did not like the idea of its fighters combating deep into enemy territory up to say 1944. Later part of 1944 the formed a few elite Fighter Regiments for free hunting behind enemy lines. Their planes were equipped with gun cameras as an extra measurement for claim accuracy. How much that was because of general paranoid of the Stalinist society and how much because of the state was paying a substantial reward (1,000 rubles) for confirmed kills, I don't know.

Well, most of the Soviet fighters had pretty short range anyway, not until probably around 1944 did they have some longer ranged Yak 9s right? I guess they also had Kittyhawks etc.

But god forbid you got shot down in Axis territory, the theory was you would turn fascist just by touching the soil, or so it seemed...

JoblinTheGoblin · Oct 3, 2025

Geoffrey Sinclair said:
Next comes actually drilling down to the day to day/week to week data.

That would be helpful, if you are still willing to post in this thread, that is.

Geoffrey Sinclair said:
Adding 618 claimed destroyed on the ground by the FEAF and 63 by Alaska/Pacific forces plus 425 USN claims shifts things, remembering how many IJNAF aircraft went down with their carriers is another factor (250 or so at Midway, USN Carrier aircraft claimed 69 kills for June, 1942 and land based 21), plus the elite IJNAF strike crews went in close which exposed them to even then quite effective USN AA fire. Also important is figures like for WWII Aircraft carrier operations the USN reports action sortie losses as 1,428 to AA, 449 to aircraft and 1,001 to other causes, while action sorties will normally cover strike aircraft fighters have to see combat to be counted, so their losses are undercounted here. Land based operations for the war say action sorties 551 losses to AA, 446 to aircraft, 343 operational.

This is relevant to the topic of over-claiming, I suppose. There's still the main issue at hand, that being the performance of 2nd generation Allied fighter aircraft in combat against the A6M and Ki-43, especially with experienced airmen piloting the former.

As for your other points, I feel that I will need to gather information, especially from the other sources recommended or mentioned in this thread, like Bloody Shambles and Claringbould's non-Osprey titles, before I can properly respond to your data. As it stands, the F6F, F4U and P-38 did not appear to fare well in individual engagements against the A6M.

Thumpalumpacus said:
Why are you making this distinction without a difference? So far as I know, a forced landing is a forced landing is a forced landing, whether the cause be enemy action, mechanical difficulty, airframe damage (which is not always related to enemy action) and so on. You asked me about forced landings. If you wanted to know about forced landings caused by enemy action, then you should have asked that clearly.

I did flip-flop in my head over what a forced-landing was, and whether it could be caused by non-combat, operational reasons as well. Then again, Claringbould, when he mentioned force-landings in his F4U-A6M book, was often referring to incidents caused by damage inflicted by enemy aircraft, usually not making it back to base either, hence why I was thinking primarily of forced landings caused by enemy action, as that book is one of the main reasons why I made this thread. In fact, that's the only type of forced landing I have been referring to this entire thread, as opposed to what you have falsely accused me of.

Thumpalumpacus said:
By the way, there are a couple of threads on the topic.

Years old, probably. Someone like

GregP didn't bring up any when he first suggested a separate thread on the matter. I might look for them in my own spare time, if I even want to now.

Thumpalumpacus said:
If you remember the context, this part of the discussion is about post-war service of Japanese airframes. It's obvious they would need to gain weight in order to stay viable. Adding that weight without adding more power is not going to give you a top-tier fighter. Unfortunately, the Japanese engine industry was at the time digging out from the rubble, which puts paid to the idea of post-war Zeroes and so on.

It's baffling why you can't simply accept such a glaringly obvious point.

From what I saw, it was merely some open-ended, silly hypothetical. Anyone, not just Japan. It could have been Cloudcuckooland or Shangri-La, even. My main point there was just that, since experienced pilots could keep up with the Corsair in the 'obsolete tin-can' that 'was' the Zero, they could probably perform similar activities to the upgraded Corsairs that participated in later conflicts in minimally upgraded A6Ms, or aircraft sharing a similar design philosophy, like some (marginally) alternate version of the A7M. Probably bag a jet even.

Thumpalumpacus said:
Not if they are not caused by combat. You keep trying to slide that assumption into the discussion, which makes this a form of circular reasoning or question-begging.

I have never done such a thing, nor Claringbould or Dunn. Only you and, to a lesser extent,

GregP , have claimed that anyone has done such a thing. I find it hard to continue this discussion any further after an accusation like this. In any case, it's clear that you haven't read Claringbould's or Dunn's works, so you don't know what you're talking about here. I won't spoon-feed the likes of you with information from the works. I'll post that whenever I want to, wherever I want to. I'm hardly in the mood to do anything right now, let alone type away in this old, dusty corner of the web, especially with people like you hanging around it. I'm certainly apprehensive about reading the works of any of the authors you have mentioned, unless they actually take into account Japanese records without immediately dismissing them as 'non-comprehensive' or burned away in some firebombing or document destruction like you, (or they, possibly) have.

Steamed_Banana said:
You can still find them. Vol III is probably the most useful of the Bloody Shambles series. It's not as good as MAW with the summaries at the end of each day's records, but he does have a lot of valuable information in there. It's just a little trickier and more time consuming to dig out and quantify in aggregate.

I guess so. I'm on track to acquire them soon, anyway.

Steamed_Banana said:
As noted previously, even the IJA and IJN and the Soviets wanted to know how many planes they lost and how many enemy planes they actually got.

True.

Steamed_Banana said:
Claringbould, like all of these authors, has his own preferences, biases and point of view. I think his conclusions are less valuable than the data. And as much as I applaud his work (this guy is incredibly prolific lately) I am seriously looking forward to someone else going through these same records (more on this in a second) and finding and pointing up any errors or subtle emphasis he may have made.

Indeed. I was hoping for the remote chance that someone in this forum was enough of an expert to do so, but remote a hope it was.

Steamed_Banana said:
As for the inexperienced Axis pilots and aircrew, this becomes true and very real at some point, but I think it gets exaggerated a lot as an excuse.

My, or rather, Claringbould's, point exactly. I'm primarily a messenger.

Steamed_Banana said:
It is of course, very hard to quantify how many skilled and trained pilots based on currently available data. Someone could do a study as to the average age, years of experience, and length of training of pilots in different units over time, that data is probably available.

For the Japanese, that is a major problem by later in 1944 - Leyte Gulf was in Oct 1944, and by then there were much fewer experienced pilots. But the Corsair was definitely active still at the hard part before the real momentum shift after the tipping point, and Hellcat was involved when the Japanese still had plenty of good pilots around, as the Allied forces found out a couple of times over and around Rabaul.

Defining when the tipping point for this actually was is worth further investigation, but I don't think it was in 1943. At least not universally.

From what I've read, including first-hand accounts, the "tipping point" you speak of seems like it would vary by location, as opposed to just time alone. Say, for instance, Truk and Palau vs Rabaul and the Solomons. I'm thinking that this point had been reached and exceeded sometime in early or mid-1944.

Steamed_Banana said:
I also think in general, this is something which needs to be applied consistently but usually isn't. This argument gets brought up every time Allied victories are discussed, but many of the same people almost completely disregard the disadvantages suffered by the Allied pilots in the early war when the Axis air forces were making their reputations. Many of the Allied units fighting around New Guinea for example had almost no time on type or things like gunnery training. IIRC the 49th FG only had about 5% experienced pilots and about the same percentage trained on the aircraft they were going to fly into combat. They were very lucky that their CO was experienced.

So many of the Soviet losses in the early war were of biplanes, barely 300 mph I-16s, antiquated SB bombers, and new types (MiG-3, LaGG-3, Yak-1) that had not been fully developed either at the design or production level. And yet, we praise the Luftwaffe pilots all their high scores... we praise the Japanese aces who scored so many victories over I-153s, I-16s, Hawk II and III, P-26s, Martin B-10s and SBs, B-18s, Buffalos, Curtiss Hawks, P-35s, early mark Hurricanes etc. in places like China, Burma, Malaya, Philippines, when they often had overhwelming numerical superiority and a great deal of combat experience.

Not to say the Luftwaffe, Finnish Ilmavoimat, IJN and IJA, and yes the Italian Regia Aeronautica didn't also achieve astonishing success against much better aircraft flown by much more experienced pilots and aircrew, because they certainly did. But the same is true on both sides. It's a mix of circumstances on both sides. The pilot who scored a lot of real victories in say mid 1942 - mid 1943 is more impressive to me than the pilot who scored a lot in 1940-41 (with the exception of the Battle of Britain and Battle of France) or in later 1944-45.

I don't disagree.

Steamed_Banana said:
I agree with your main point - this is also true for many, many other fields of history. But it's also true that things like 'teething issues' and bad tactics are very real. The Axis, let's not forget, got to practice a lot in places like Manchuria and in the Spanish Civil War, and hone their tactics and fine tune some of their machines (and inform new designs) from that experience. That really matters a lot. There is a lead time which varies a lot by type, (sometimes a few weeks, sometimes years) before they became really viable. And the wider the leap being made the longer that lead time, on average (though it varies widely).

The question here is, how much of an influence did these teething issues really have on the performance of aircraft like the Corsair in combat? Going by the statement of one particular user in this thread, it's almost as if nations were carelessly tossing malfunctioning prototypes into the sky. The Corsair almost seems like the Panther of the skies, if the Panther performed as poorly as some Wehraboo over-correctors have claimed it did.

Steamed_Banana said:
Worthy question, but i think you are maybe a bit too reductive here.... there were other reasons why even early versions of some of the newer, better planes were more useful.

They had a couple of bad days, and I tink this did come down to "teething issues" which were extensive for the P-38, and bad tactics.

To understand the advantages of the newer more expensive planes, I think we have to go beyond Tactical benefits, even though those do matter, and also consider Strategic or Operational merits.

Early P-38s were very hard to fly, they had serious electrical problems, rolled and turned poorly, could not safely dive at high speeds due to serious compressibility problems, could not operate at very high altitudes (partly due to totally inadequate heating systems) etc. etc. A few pilots figured out how to use them really well, like Bong and McGuire. One P-38 Ace who also did well flying P-40s, Robert DeHaven, said the following:

"If you flew wisely, the P-40 was a very capable aircraft. [It] could outturn a P-38, a fact that some pilots didn't realize when they made the transition between the two aircraft. [...] The real problem with it was lack of range. As we pushed the Japanese back, P-40 pilots were slowly left out of the war. So when I moved to P-38s, an excellent aircraft, I did not [believe] that the P-40 was an inferior fighter, but because I knew the P-38 would allow us to reach the enemy. I was a fighter pilot and that was what I was supposed to do."

How the P-38 was in fact better
I bolded the key bit. The P-38 had the range that P-40 didn't have and the P-39 definitely didn't have. In South Pacific Air War Vol 6, which as i noted, I just read so it's fresh in my mind, about half of the big Allied bombing missions were escorted only by P-38s. Claringbould noted that the P-40s could reach some of these targets (like Lae) but they did not have enough fuel to properly form up with all the bomber units, a major challenge as numerous bomber squadrons from multiple bases would ideally try to join together on raids (for safety). But the P-38s did. So the P-38 was an asset, even if it was roughly the same in air combat as a P-40, or only marginally better in early 1943, it was already something you could use at a much greater distance. Maybe something like 500 miles instead of 200. P-38 could also be used to escort heavy bombers like B-24s and B-17s at 20,000+ feet, which a P-40 really couldn't do. So that's another major Strategic benefit (and a major reason why USAAF liked P-38s better than P-40s).

While an enemy aircraft, the A6M was also similarly long-ranged and capable, while being a cheaper and simpler design, and it was a carrier-borne aircraft at that...

Steamed_Banana said:
One other thing we can do to kind of suss out one type from another is to look at the claims. We know there was overclaiming but we also don't have any reason to believe pilots of one type overclaimed more than pilots of another type in the same service branch. So P-38 pilots made 1700 claims in the Pacific Theater. P-40 pilots made 660 claims in the PTO. P-39 pilots made 288. That tells us something. We also had one P-39 Ace in the PTO, about thirty flying P-40s in the PTO, and about 35 flying the P-38. we had 58 Wildcat aces, about 300 in the Hellcat, and 123 in the Corsair. (Also worth noting that P-40s and P-39s were no longer in the fight very much after 1943, mainly due to range limitations)

The PTO as a whole? Given the oft-mentioned decline in Japanese pilot quality, coupled with rising Allied pilot quality, and the likely rampening up of conflict (incuding the build-up of Allied air assets in the theatre, though I honestly am unsure how much larger aerial engagements in late-1943–45 were compared to those in 1941–early-1943), it seems natural that 2nd generation aircraft would have more claims and aces to their names without necessarily being outright superior. I'm not entirely sure as to the validity of my point here, however.

Steamed_Banana said:
However, the early P-38s were not ideal escort fighters. They had advantages over the A6M and Ki-43, but only in a fairly narrow band of speed and altitude. At around 16-25,000 ft, they were significantly faster and could hit and run by using high-speed shallow climbs, but down lower their advantage was less. These were early P-38s so diving away from combat was a tricky and very risky business. When they didn't follow these rules they took losses. It's kind of amazing that on balance, they actually did fairly well, but due to flying more in their ideal zone, i.e. at middling-high altitude, which sometimes meant they didn't escort the bombers so well. This was also, interestingly, true for Bf 109s in the Mediterranean Theater.

I suppose that, in light of its initial defects, the P-38 didn't perform terribly, and the real problem appears to extend beyond the plane itself. Still, the A6M emerges as a formidable fighter and solid design, the Lightning less so, at least with its earlier models. The claimed technological superiority had yet to truly manifest.

Steamed_Banana said:
How the Hellcat and Corsair were better
The Wildcat, in air to air combat, actually held it's own against both A6M and Ki-43. That is a very interesting fact that the hard data shows us in these revisionist histories. They even had a slight edge, it seems, certainly in campaigns like Guadalcanal. But they also had a lot of limitations. The biggest one which was especially damning for a carrier fighter was it's terrible rate of climb. The F4F-3 had a mediocre rate of climb around 2,200 feet per minute. But only 285 of those were built. The much more ubiquitous F4F-4 Wildcat climbed somewhere between 1600 ft per minute to around 1800 ft per minute. Which is really bad! This never really got alleviated until the FM-2 arrived in 1944. The F4F-4 also carried 240 rounds of ammunition for it's guns. The poor climb rate meant that Wildcat combat air patrol often failed to intercept enemy IJN strikes during several major carrier battles in the Pacific War. The limited ammunition meant they often ran out of bullets while these crucial carrier battles were still going on.

The early F4U had a rate of climb orf about 2,900 fpm and the F6F, which became the main USN carrier fighter, climbed at 3,250 fpm. This may not have been as good as some planes, but it was almost twice as good as the F4F. The F6F carried 400 rounds for it's six heavy machine guns, the F4U carried 375-400. Much better again. Range was also a bit better, about 10-20% more than the Wildcat.

True, but, once again, the A6M had good climb and range too, capable of intercepting medium/heavy bombers, while being a cheaper and simpler airframe...

Steamed_Banana said:
So aside from being 60-70 mph faster right out the gate, both of these newer types had much more Strategic value than the earlier US carrier fighter (Wildcat) both for combat air patrol and for flying on strikes. This also applied to the FAA since the Wildcat / Martlet was arguably their best carrier fighter too and they also ended up uprgading to the Hellcat and Corsair, albeit they got them too late. The F4U in particular also turned out to be a very effective fighter-bomber, carrying a pretty heavy bomb load of around 2,000 (later versions carried more) vs about 200-500 lbs for a Wildcat, and it could bomb pretty accurately. This improved the value of the Corsair so much that it contributed to the phasing-out of the problematic SB2C "Helldiver" carrier dive bomber.

This almost makes up for the previous struggles the F4U (and F6F, as it was used in a similar fighter-bomber role to some degree, apparently) faced in combat against the A6M, though it appears to me like a demotion of sorts, given that the F4U (and F6F), if I'm correct, wasn't developed as a fighter-bomber, especially in a significant capacity. The Japanese also had dive bombers with similar performances to the A6M (mainly in level and turning speed, I believe), the D4Y and the B7A, both of which would have been cheaper than the F4U or F6F, being equipped with sub-2000HP engines. One jack-of-all-trades airframe may be cheaper than two separate, specialised airframes, even if both are cheaper individually, but the F4U, F6F, and even the SB2C itself were used for bombing operations. The Japanese dive bombers, regardless of their speed, didn't perform as well against F6F and F4U as these aircraft could against the A6M or other Japanese fighter aircraft, so I suppose that their fighter-bomber capability was a legitimate strength.

Still, it seems that the Japanese design philosophy, especially regarding its fighter aircraft, appears better, if by a hair's breadth, doing more with less.

Steamed_Banana said:
Read Shores Bloody Shambles III I think it will be a revelation on this, and many other things. It does not make the Ki-43 look bad by any stretch, mind you, but it's pretty clear that the Spit VIII offered an advantage in combat. It also had about twice the range of a Spit V or any mark Hurricane, and much better altitude performance. So here again, Strategic advantages. That said, the Spit VIII did not have anywhere near the range of the P-51B/C/D or the P-38 and probably not the P-47 depending on subtype and mission profile. So those had a bit more Strategic advantage.

I havent' added up all the numbers but it definitely looks like the Spit VIII shot down considerably more Ki-43s in Burma / India than they lost, and the JAAF pilots themselves discussed this, Shores quotes them in the book. As do some other authors.

Really, quotes even? I've been wondering if anyone in this forum could provide such accounts from Japanese pilots themselves, given all the doubt in this thread, and within me to some degree, about Japanese wartime records.

Steamed_Banana said:
Sure but that's just one day, or am I missing something? What's the total for the month?

Admittedly, Claringbould appeared to have neglected to provide totals for A6M losses to Corsairs. This problem was highlighted in a review of one of his Osprey-published books, which is one of the reasons why I am not entirely convinced by his conclusions, and subsequently started this thread in the first place.

Steamed_Banana said:
2-1 is really good (bad for the losing side) if your are flying and being engaged frequently. A squadron is only 10-20 aircraft, depending on the unit.

That was the more optimistic ratio for the Spitfire VIII, at least if Dunn is correct in his conclusions. Otherwise, the ratio appears to be closer to 1.5, or even 1.

Steamed_Banana said:
Consider this though. Guys like Shores, Bergstrom, Claringbould etc. have done the hard work now of finding these records. Unless they somehow locked down copyright or access (which I doubt but you never know these days) we should likely see many more similar works. I know these have been popular and as the significance increasingly (finally) occurs to people, more and more I think interest is growing. So hopefully we will see more and better analysis and data.

Perhaps. So far, the 2nd generation Allied aircraft of the PTO still don't appear to compare all that favourably with the A6M and Ki-43, especially the former, with their later successes, especially ones of an exorbitant nature, arising more so due to growing weaknesses in their opponents than in their own merits, with broader implications elsewhere. Endless questions continue to plague my consciousness. How capable were IJAAF pilots compared to their naval counterparts? How would the Ki-43 have fared against the A6M? How would aircraft like the Spitfire VIII (and the P-47D), given their potentially small margins over the Ki-43, have fared against A6Ms operated by experienced pilots? I've heard in other forums and places across the internet that IJNAF pilots, primarily those serving before or around 1941, were the best of the best among Japanese airmen. How true is this notion?

Thumpalumpacus · Oct 3, 2025

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Years old, probably. Someone like GregP didn't bring up any when he first suggested a separate thread on the matter. I might look for them in my own spare time, if I even want to now.

One of them is around two years old.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I have never done such a thing, nor Claringbould or Dunn. Only you and, to a lesser extent, GregP , have claimed that anyone has done such a thing. I find it hard to continue this discussion any further after an accusation like this.

I can't blame you for not wanting to defend it, myself.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
In any case, it's clear that you haven't read Claringbould's or Dunn's works, so you don't know what you're talking about here.

As if they are the only informed sources on this issue. This is you pushing goalposts. "If you haven't read my favorite books, I won't talk to you."

Well fine.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I won't spoon-feed the likes of you with information from the works.

Wow. I like helping people learn, myself. Helping folk is enjoyable to me.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I'll post that whenever I want to, wherever I want to.

No one's trying to shut you up. Climb down off the cross.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I'm hardly in the mood to do anything right now, let alone type away in this old, dusty corner of the web, especially with people like you hanging around it.

I can understand how someone who wants an internally coherent argument might disturb your Force.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I'm certainly apprehensive about reading the works of any of the authors you have mentioned, unless they actually take into account Japanese records without immediately dismissing them as 'non-comprehensive' or burned away in some firebombing or document destruction like you, (or they, possibly) have.

You clearly haven't even heard of Lundstrom or Gamble, else you'd know the very high esteem they carry in the historical community here.

I'm done with you. Even if you don't follow through on your threat to stop posting, you will no longer be on my screen. *plonk*

Shortround6 · Oct 3, 2025

Unit performance could vary a lot from unit to unit, some depended on commanders and some was luck of the draw and some was unit history/pride. And ground crew was important.

The combat situation could vary a lot and in two ways in general, tactical/that day combat situation and the general campaign/theater situation. British got much worse results flying over France, Belgium and Holland than they did in the BoB. Why? For most of 1941 there were not enough Fw 190s to affect the entire campaign and the Germans were out numbered. British had a higher percentage of Spitfires vs Hurricanes flying 1941.
Japanese shifted over to the Defensive in 1943 in general, different times in different areas. On defense you are going to get more of your 'damaged' planes back to base. Shorter flight times with damaged aircraft. On the other hand your ground crews are spending time fixing damaged aircraft and not servicing planes in good condition. OK they are doing both and both sided ground crews did a lot of work keeping up.

Sometimes I ask myself (and others) what would happen if you swapped planes between two sides.
In the BoB if the British had 109s and the Germans had Spits and Hurricanes?
What would have happened in Guadalcanal if the Americans had Zeros and the Japanese had Wildcats and P-40s (Japanese would have had to capture an Island some what closer) ?
What would some of the outcomes have been?
A big difference between the two was ammo capacity/combat persistence. Another difference is that the .50s were easier to hit with. They had shorter time of flight and did not need as much lead.
This may be an under appreciated difference the Zero as time went on. We all know there were differences but what did the differences actually mean?
For the Americans, except for the P-38s and P-39s (and the P-39 had a crappy armament set up) it was the .50 can the question was 4 or 6 (P-47 excepted) and how much ammo and that varied from about 18 seconds to just over 30 seconds of ammo.
I don't know what the optimum number of seconds is but around 30 seconds is probably too long, Butch O'Hare not withstanding. American planes were carrying hundreds of pounds of ammo and structure (and engine and fuel) that they didn't need over 95% of the time. On the other hand early Zeros ran out of cannon ammo in about 8 seconds and a pair of .303 Vickers guns (updated to fire about 50% faster than the guns in a Sopwith Camel) where what they had to carry on the fight. Japanese did two/three things to Zero to improve gunnery as we all know. The effects of those changes is often glossed over. Increasing firing time by 66% was big even if it doesn't sound big.
The job of a fighter is not to outmaneuver an opponent and thus gain victory. The job of the fighter is to transport guns/firepower to a suitable location/firing position using maneuver/performance (speed/climb. etc). Japanese tended to forget the guns/armament, the Americans with the F4F/P-39/P-40 tended to over look the 2nd part.
To somewhat excuse the Japanese the guns/firepower stayed the same for almost 20 years in most air forces around the world. From wiki "In September 1938, when the Munich Crisis threatened war with Germany, 45 per cent of the RAF's fighter squadrons (nine squadrons) still flew the Gauntlet (older than the Galiator and with two .303 machine guns) , with only three squadrons equipped with Hurricanes."
The world was changing fast in 1937-42.

Another thing as far as designs go. I don't think anybody designed a NEW plane after 1939-41 that got into service in response to an enemy plane. The Ki-84 was started in early 1942 and was following the general trend of starting work on a successor when the present plane is starting to enter service with the first service squadrons.
The tale that the F6F was designed to combat the Zero is a lie. How much the F8F was influenced by the Zero is subject to question and it did not get into combat in WW II. Concept (smaller than a F6F using R-2800 with less complicated supercharger and 2/3ds guns/ammo) was stared in late June of 1942, not much was done until 1943 (Grumman was kind of busy with other things in late 1942/early 1943).
Long winded way of saying that the US was using planes in 1943-44 whose concepts date to 1940-41 in regards to both armament (gun types, number of guns and amount of ammo) and performance. Basically they were using in 1944 planes that were conceived before Pearl Harbor. Aircraft designers look at the load first then start designing the plane. very few people design a plane and then see what kind of guns and how many they can stick in it. An F6F was designed to carry about 1150lbs of guns and ammo, not including mounts, brackets, ammo boxes/trays and access doors/hatches. Basically about 50% more than an F4F-3 and if you want more speed and range you are going to need a lot bigger plane than an F4F-3. Once you tool up for it you are stuck with it. Taking two guns out of an F6F still means you are stuck with the bigger wing, larger landing gear, bigger fuselage, larger fuel tanks and so on.
US also had problem in 1940-41. They were changing the .50 cal machine gun in 1940 and 1941. They increased the rate of fire from 600rpm (at best) to about 800rpm on average (unsynchronized ) but they had a lot of trouble with guns in service in 1941. They also increased the MV from 2500fps to around 2850-2880fps for a lot more power and shorter time of flight (less lead time) and they were also changing some of the projectiles (the Incendiary was not very satisfactory).
So in 1941, as an aircraft planner (buyer) what do you tell the aircraft designers) companies what you want? Four .50s or six? with how much ammo? or some unknown type of gun?

Lets remember that even the P-51 was an early 1940 design with a later engine shoehorned into it
Also remember that the US was not using 100/130 fuel in 1940 or most of 1941, they didn't even know what 100/130 was for most of 1941. The US was fooling around with 100/125 near the end of 1941. Most of the engine design work in 1940/early 1941 was with US 100/100 fuel. British fuel ate seals/gaskets and self sealing tanks with those hand maidens of the devil, aromatic compounds, which ere banned from US fuels.
There were reasons why US fighters were designed they way they were, mostly. P-39 has never been explained without the idea that plain envelopes containing unknown contents were exchanged were somehow involved

A late model A6M has got a lot more firepower than an early model one, it has a least, some what better protection. It has got more power although not enough. And it has some of the early flight problems at least tweaked compared to the A6M2. A bit higher dive speed and a bit better roll response (tabs).
There were a number of changes, introduced over time, often without much visible change so at times action reports are not going to give an accurate picture. The A6M5 first showed up in Aug 1943 but this is a bit blurry as the one of the main features, the shorter more rounded wing tip was used on the last of the A6M3 model 22 but these kept the exhaust collector with two outlets and not the individual stacks of the true A6M5 model 52. After the first 370 A6M5s they got a CO2 fire suppression system for the wing tanks, how effective it was???
The A6M5a got the belt feeds on the cannon which increase ammo capacity by 25 round (100 to 125) and after 114 planes they also increase the wing thickness and went from a 360kt dive speed to 400kt dive speed. The A6M5b got BP glass behind the windscreen and changed one 7.7mm gun to 13.2mm gun (pretty much identical to the US .50, for good or evil). Not visible to enemy pilots and small BP glass only offers small protection over small arc. Change in fire power is not large.

The A6M5c with the 13.2mm guns in the wings actually has as much or more firepower than the F6F per second. The A6M2 had about 2/3rs the firepower and for about 1/2 the time as the A6M5c.

Steamed_Banana · Oct 3, 2025

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I guess so. I'm on track to acquire them soon, anyway.

You'll find it eye opening, I'm sure

JoblinTheGoblin said:
True.

Indeed. I was hoping for the remote chance that someone in this forum was enough of an expert to do so, but remote a hope it was.

We can probably get there. From reading this forum for many years, I think there is often a strong reaction in here to "outsiders" with outlier theories or claims. And for good reason, since part of what has to be done to understand anything real about the war is to bat down an endless stream of fantasies, delusions, legends, tropes, and silly conspiracy theories and so forth. Until all that kind of 'noise' is dealt with, it's very hard to have a meaningful discussion. Many people here are very well read and have a lot of data, vast libraries, primary source documents etc., and sometimes life experience as some people here actually work on restoring and maintaining warbirds, which is very helpful in understanding the aircraft from the war. But you have to kind of prove yourself before that kind of discussion begins, it seems.

All this operational history data is somewhat revolutionary in it's implications, and it's a lot to wrestle with based on the decades of writing and analysis that it seems to overthrow.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
My, or rather, Claringbould's, point exactly. I'm primarily a messenger.

From what I've read, including first-hand accounts, the "tipping point" you speak of seems like it would vary by location, as opposed to just time alone. Say, for instance, Truk and Palau vs Rabaul and the Solomons. I'm thinking that this point had been reached and exceeded sometime in early or mid-1944.

Yes, it definitely did vary by specific area. And this is further complicated by the fact that some of the more experienced units, like 64th Sentai in China / Burma or Tainan Kokutai in the South Pacific, were sometimes moved around like a fire-brigade. So you might have an area 'softening up' i.e. due to less experienced pilots and probably ground crews too, and they send in the hard core veteran group to prop things up. All of the sudden Allied pilots are facing much more experienced opponent's including 30 and 40 victory aces etc. Poorly performing or shot up units got rotated out or disbanded in some cases. Some units which came from Japan or from other Theaters (moved from CBI to South Pacific for example) were well trained and had high morale, some were the reverse.

So it was kind of a 'fits and starts' thing. Clearly by late 1944 the point had passed though.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I don't disagree.

The question here is, how much of an influence did these teething issues really have on the performance of aircraft like the Corsair in combat? Going by the statement of one particular user in this thread, it's almost as if nations were carelessly tossing malfunctioning prototypes into the sky. The Corsair almost seems like the Panther of the skies, if the Panther performed as poorly as some Wehraboo over-correctors have claimed it did.

I would say that needless to say, in aggregate all of these 'teething' issues were very serious, and it wasn't at all unusual. The Ki-43 went through major "teething issues", to the point that wings were falling off in dives, guns / ammunition were exploding, etc. It wasn't minor or trivial stuff and it took almost a year to correct these things. There were also other problems like the two blade propeller, the antiquated periscope style gunsight etc. The A6M wasn't as fraught but it had some significant issues too, these were worked out in early days after it was introduced in China, but I'll circle back to that.

I would say there is a range between something like say, the Hawker Typhoon, which took multiple years to only partially straighten out, and the F6F which seems to have been relatively trouble free. The F4U, P-38, and P-47 fall somewhere in the middle. All three were functional fighters right out the gate but had significant maintenance issues and needed training adjustments before they were really performing optimally, which in every case took at least a year or more to sort out.

But the main point here is that all WW2 combat aircraft had substantial teething problems. All WW2 military aircraft, really any military aircraft from any era, say post 1915 or 16) are very complex machines, operating in quite extreme environments ranging from absolutely frigid in thin air to broiling hot and humid, quite often on the same day and within a few minutes... required to undergo 4 -6 G stresses, battle damage, flying at extremely high speeds of 400+ mph, enduring incredible weather (violent thunderstorms were a daily event around New Guinea and the Solomons, in the CBI it rained for 5 months per year in the Monsoon season) undergoing maintenance by teenagers with malaria living in tents etc., often without so much as a hangar to keep the sun and rain off of the machine.

Most Japanese aircraft, incidentally, had very serious maintenance problems in the tropical conditions. One reason why the Ki-43 and A6M stuck around for so long is that replacements didn't work out because they just couldn't keep them flying in places like Rabaul and Lae and Rangoon, and these two older planes were around long enough that most of their maintenance and 'teething' issues were worked out. But that also posed problems.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
While an enemy aircraft, the A6M was also similarly long-ranged and capable, while being a cheaper and simpler design, and it was a carrier-borne aircraft at that...

The A6M had a couple of major problems though, both Strategic and Tactical. First, it never did have good altitude performance, or at least not until the (long overdue) updated A6M5 types arrived, far too late. A6M3 with it's two-speed supercharger had a bit better altitude performance than the A6M2 but this came at a big hit in fuel capacity and range (partly because the new supercharger used more fuel, partly because it carried less fuel) and neither was ever very good at shooting down US heavy bombers flying at altitude.

Bombers on both sides had a balance of options of how to attack a target like enemy ships or an enemy airfield or port. Either fly high and safe, or low and accurate. Often it was something in between. But the Japanese medium bombers often flew raids at 20-25,000', and flew their fast recon planes like Ki-15 and Ki-46 at similar heights, and early USAAF fighters in particular really struggled to intercept them. Even the Spitfires famously had problems with this. 49th FG at Darwin and later New Guinea somehow worked out viable methods, but it came at a cost. P-40s (except for the Merlin engined ones) and P-39s could not really fight well above 15,000 feet. Wildcats were decent up to around 22,000 ft which was one of their few technical advantages.

But similarly, the A6Ms couldn't effectively shoot down large numbers of B-24s and B-17s flying over their bases or ships, which meant at the very least US forces had recon of Japanese assets, just as the Japanese were losing theirs. F4F could fly at altitude, F6F, P-38 and Corsair were all very good at 25,000+ ft, which meant that these planes, as soon as they appeared, rectified this problem for the US. The Japanese were soon no longer able to effectively project their air power, whereas the US was still sending unescorted bomber groups over Lae etc. well into 1943. Bombing at altitude, while comparatively safe, often meant very poor accuracy, but recon is always vital in war. And those heavy bombers often wrecked Japanese air bases.

A6M2 and Ki-43-I were also fairly slow, which may not have mattered as much as we thought in fighter vs fighter combat, but they had a relatively hard time catching fast, low-flying bombers / strafers like the A-20 and Beaufighter - much more so than the Allied fighters did with Japanese equivalents like G3M, G4M and Ki-21, and this meant that the Japanese soon had to provide heavy escorts for bombing raids, or bomb at night or twilight which made them even less accurate. In the CBI they used to send a bomber force of as little as 6 or 8 lightly loaded bombers like Ki-30 or Ki-48 escorted by as many as 40 or 50 Ki-43 fighters. That usually seemed to work fairly well to protect the bombers but it meant those fighters couldn't be used for other things, and with only a handful of relatively small bombs hitting the rough vicinity of the target, meaning damage was usually light. So it was a significant limitation.

The A6M2, which was still being used well into 1943, also suffered for lack of ammunition, only 60 rounds for the cannons, which was a major issue during several carrier battles especially, including at Midway but also in the battles around Guadalcanal.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
The PTO as a whole? Given the oft-mentioned decline in Japanese pilot quality, coupled with rising Allied pilot quality, and the likely rampening up of conflict (incuding the build-up of Allied air assets in the theatre, though I honestly am unsure how much larger aerial engagements in late-1943–45 were compared to those in 1941–early-1943), it seems natural that 2nd generation aircraft would have more claims and aces to their names without necessarily being outright superior. I'm not entirely sure as to the validity of my point here, however.

I don't disagree, clearly the big battles like at Leyte Gulf were relatively one-sided, in part also because by then the US had clear numerical superiority as well. But the performance edge was also clearly a factor.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
I suppose that, in light of its initial defects, the P-38 didn't perform terribly, and the real problem appears to extend beyond the plane itself. Still, the A6M emerges as a formidable fighter and solid design, the Lightning less so, at least with its earlier models. The claimed technological superiority had yet to truly manifest.

The Lightning, right out of the gate, did seem to have at least some edge over the A6M, and it had longer range (especially over A6M3) and better altitude capability. For Pacific Theater having two engines was also clearly an advantage for attrition on those long flights home. The biggest disadvantage of the P-38, aside from the quite serious "teething" issues was relatively slow initial production rate, training and delivery to front line units. But it was clearly a big boost in capability for the Allied air forces.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
True, but, once again, the A6M had good climb and range too, capable of intercepting medium/heavy bombers, while being a cheaper and simpler airframe...

I would say the A6M's record vs US heavy and medium bombers was dramatically less impressive than P-38 or any Allied fighter vs Japanese multi-engine bombers. There are several well-known incidents where catastrophically high numbers of G3M and G4M bombers were shot down even by P-40s and Wildcats in 1942 and 1943, and it only got worse from there, to the point that the Japanese as I noted up above, had to start using them at night or twilight, or with very heavy fighter escort (which got harder and harder to organize), while the Allies were very much still able to use their multi-engined bombers, in fact more and more. A6Ms sometimes did shoot down US heavy bombers but almost always at a fairly significant cost in lost fighters, much more than the Allied fighters lost in similar circumstances.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
This almost makes up for the previous struggles the F4U (and F6F, as it was used in a similar fighter-bomber role to some degree, apparently) faced in combat against the A6M, though it appears to me like a demotion of sorts, given that the F4U (and F6F), if I'm correct, wasn't developed as a fighter-bomber, especially in a significant capacity. The Japanese also had dive bombers with similar performances to the A6M (mainly in level and turning speed, I believe), the D4Y and the B7A, both of which would have been cheaper than the F4U or F6F, being equipped with sub-2000HP engines. One jack-of-all-trades airframe may be cheaper than two separate, specialised airframes, even if both are cheaper individually, but the F4U, F6F, and even the SB2C itself were used for bombing operations. The Japanese dive bombers, regardless of their speed, didn't perform as well against F6F and F4U as these aircraft could against the A6M or other Japanese fighter aircraft, so I suppose that their fighter-bomber capability was a legitimate strength.

I would say it most definitely was. The F4U carried as much or more bombs (2,000 lbs+) than even the Japanese twin engined types (including Ki-21, G3M, G4M, Ki-48, Ki-49 etc.), it could bomb more accurately, with low altitude / dive bombing, had a much lower loss rate in action, and could also shoot down Zeros and Ki-43s at a fairly high (and ever increasing) rate. And could operate from aircraft carriers. So yep. The only advantage the Japanese twin engined bombers had over the F4U was range, but being able to fly from a boat somewhat negated that.

As for the D4Y and the B7A, I think you are missing a bit of important information here. D4Y was a promising and very interesting design (with an even more interesting design history) but it had major teething problems. Turned out not to be able to dive due to tail flutter, which is a pretty big deal for a dive bomber, and also extremely severe maintenance problems with it's liquid cooled engine (a copy of the DB 600 series, like on the similarly troubled Ki-61). This meant that while D4Y was available in very small numbers by Midway, it could only be used as a recon plane. Eventually changes to the tail and a new engine turned it into a pretty capable dive bomber, but that came too late and only a few were used. I think they got a handful of hits late in the war, including a couple of lethal carrier hits, but it was really a missed opportunity.

The B7A, while an absolutely superb design by all accounts, had even less impact in the war. It had a long design cycle apparently largely due to problems with it's powerful new Homare engine, extending from a first flight in 1942 to initial production in May 1944, and first actual deployment in June 1944. Production was slow and hampered by an earthquake. Only 114 were ever built, and as it was too big to operate on a normal carrier, and the two super-carriers it was designed for were sunk before they launched a single air strike, only a handful of these ever saw action. So no, it's a poor comparison even to the plagued SB2C, let alone the highly successful F4U. Or even the humble TBF, which had vastly more impact on the war.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Still, it seems that the Japanese design philosophy, especially regarding its fighter aircraft, appears better, if by a hair's breadth, doing more with less.

That was probably true initially, but it didn't seem to pay off over time. The A6M2 and Ki-43 were arguably almost too good for their own good, which delayed both upgrades and replacements. Similar to the Bf 109 to some extent. Very good in fighter vs fighter combat, but also had serious design limitations which the enemy learned to exploit and which their own air forces were slow to address.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Really, quotes even? I've been wondering if anyone in this forum could provide such accounts from Japanese pilots themselves, given all the doubt in this thread, and within me to some degree, about Japanese wartime records.

Yes, I have been overdue to transcribe some stuff, I'll try to get to it today.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Admittedly, Claringbould appeared to have neglected to provide totals for A6M losses to Corsairs. This problem was highlighted in a review of one of his Osprey-published books, which is one of the reasons why I am not entirely convinced by his conclusions, and subsequently started this thread in the first place.

I think Clairingbould seems to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder for some Allied fighter types, for whatever reason. Probably overcorrecting a bit for the fairly persistant myths about the supposed inferiority of the Japanese fighters. But it's also a 'Fog of War' issue. US and Allies fielded many fighter types in the Pacific - P-39 / P-400, F2A, F4F-3, F4F-4, early P-38, P-40, then later the F6F, FM-2, F4U, later model P-38s, P-51, and P-47... and some Spitfire Mk V and VIII. Then you have defensive guns on heavily armed US bombers to consider, and the (eventually quite good) Allied AAA. It can be difficult in a given air battle to know which losses were to which unit / aircraft type. Aside from trying to determine which victories went to P-38s, he made little effort to do that in the South Pacific Air War series which is one of my criticisms (he could at least list the claims by squadron / type) but perhaps he just isn't interested in that aspect.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
That was the more optimistic ratio for the Spitfire VIII, at least if Dunn is correct in his conclusions. Otherwise, the ratio appears to be closer to 1.5, or even 1.

I'll try to find some examples from Bloody Shambles III, like I said, because he doesn't do summaries it's a bit tricky to go back and find things and I don't have hours of time, but I'll take a stab at it.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Perhaps. So far, the 2nd generation Allied aircraft of the PTO still don't appear to compare all that favourably with the A6M and Ki-43, especially the former, with their later successes, especially ones of an exorbitant nature, arising more so due to growing weaknesses in their opponents than in their own merits, with broader implications elsewhere.

I think that's an overstatement. A6M and Ki-43 both remained dangerous opponents far longer than most people realized, but were increasingly limited in capability and applicability by the mid-point of the war. Some people around the aviation history world, including many who should know better, paint the Ki-43 (especially, I think) and the A6M as pushovers for pilots of later war US and UK fighters, but that certainly wasn't the case. A later model P-38, P-51, P-47, F6F or F4U definitely did have significant advantages, both Strategic and Tactical, but to apply those one had to be properly trained, and to fly with great discipline and skill. Even a momentary lapse could still very easily mean death, even after say, mid 1944.

JoblinTheGoblin said:
Endless questions continue to plague my consciousness. How capable were IJAAF pilots compared to their naval counterparts? How would the Ki-43 have fared against the A6M? How would aircraft like the Spitfire VIII (and the P-47D), given their potentially small margins over the Ki-43, have fared against A6Ms operated by experienced pilots? I've heard in other forums and places across the internet that IJNAF pilots, primarily those serving before or around 1941, were the best of the best among Japanese airmen. How true is this notion?

I think the IJN was initially better trained. JAAF pilots overall seem to have been under a more brutal regime, many of the JAAF pilots were NCOs, and officers seem to have been pushed so hard that they routinely got killed in action, and the IJA was just a hard core, brutal organization which seemed to have little regard for the lives of their pilots. The Ki-43 however, seems to have punched far above it's weight. It also lacked some of the problems with the A6M, such as the controls locking up at higher speeds, and I think the Ki-43-II got some armor and fuel tank protection a bit earlier.

Shortround6 · Oct 3, 2025

Getting back the start, the US committed to the P-38 early and without any idea of how it was really going to perform in combat.
It appears that the total US combat experience up until Oct/Nov 1942 with the P-38 was two Flying boats shot down in the Aleutian Islands in Aug and perhaps a shared victory flying out of Iceland? But the US was counting on the P-38 for air superiority for the Torch landings (or getting it several days after the landings) and deployments to both the Pacific and Europe had to take a back seat to the North African campaign. Some were in the Pacific, around 60 but replacements are going to be few and not often.
P-38 was troublesome to begin with. 2nd fighter with turbo after the P-43s (which did not see much operational service) and few fighter squadrons or mechanics had experiences with fighters that flew at 25,000ft and not 15,000ft. Basically things froze. P-38s did not have the engine in front to help heat the cockpit and the nose guns. Bombers did not strain turbo systems as much. Flex duct work joints due to maneuvers or rapid changes in pressure.
P-38 pilot training left a lot of things to be desired. It also took forever to get a 2nd generator so the 2nd engine safety factor was something of an illusion. If you lost the engine without the generator you were in pretty good shape. If you lost the engine with the generator (or if the generator quit) the return home was an exercise in electrical power management. The Batteries would not power the radio/s for several hours without going dead and the props were electric. No or low power meant you could not adjust the pitch on the props.
B-17s attacking France and Germany in Nov/Dec 1942 and early 1943 had no escorts because the P-38s had been sent to North Africa.

This also means that the USAAC is stuck with the P-38 as they can't build enough Merlin powered P-40s and the P-39 is turning into sinkhole. The P-47 is having troubles in development in 1942. In 1943 in North Africa the US is giving P-39s to the French and at least one US squadron is assigned submarine patrol rather than fight German/Italian aircraft.

If you are not away of this website

Pacific Wrecks - World War II Pacific War and Korean War

Pacific Wrecks is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to bringing home those Missing In Action (MIA), leverage new technologies in the study of past conflicts. Founded in 1995 supported by donations from viewers.

pacificwrecks.com

it may help you out.

The section on 339 squadron is helpful for early P-38 combat.

Pacific Wrecks - 339th Fighter Squadron (339th FS) "Sunsetters"

Assigned to the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF), 13th Air Force (13th AF), 347th Fighter Group (347th FG) in the South Pacific (SOPA).

pacificwrecks.com

You may have to hunt for specific combats by date.

Pacific Wrecks - February 14, 1943

Chronology of WWII Pacific War events, missions and losses on this date with links to locations, aircraft and ships. Covers U.S. Army Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, Australian, New Zealand and Japanese.

pacificwrecks.com

for the St. Valentines day massacre.
10 P-38s and 12 F4Us (on their 2nd mission) plus the bombers against 31 A6Ms (exact type not given, possible A6M2 or A6M3 ) and 11 Rufes.
Not good odds for the Americans.

Some of the accounts list planes that were not there or were there a day earlier(?).

Dimlee · Oct 3, 2025

Steamed_Banana said:
n his Black Cross / Red Star series, Christer Bergstrom estimated Luftwaffe fighter group's overclaiming as between 3-1 and 2.5-1 depending on the specific period.

To note, he has rewritten most of his BC/RS series in recent years and made a lot of corrections.

Regarding the true combat performance of the P-38 (and other advanced US fighters) in the PTO from 1942-44

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Senior Airman

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Tech Sergeant

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