The real combat history of the Ki-43

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J.A.W. said:
Tracers are for A, poor shots (as too many pilots were) & B, Fun factor for the shooter/fear factor for the recipient.

(Some 'cold war' tanks had a co-axial mg to aim-check the main gun, with tracer, IIRC).
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Must be hard to live amongst us mortals when you can calculate range, elevation and deflection angles of an enemy plane doing 350mph 300meters in front of you in the heat of battle, or the correct range of an enemy tank 1700 meters out.
 
PAT303 said:
Must be hard to live amongst us mortals when you can calculate range, elevation and deflection angles of an enemy plane doing 350mph 300meters out in front of you in the heat of battle, or the correct range of an enemy tank 1700 meters out.
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PAT303 said:
Must be hard to live amongst us mortals when you can calculate range, elevation and deflection angles of an enemy plane doing 350mph 300meters in front of you in the heat of battle, or the correct range of an enemy tank 1700 meters out.
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That's why aces were aces, & some are 'naturals' like poor old Anthony Gobert, its an almost 'otherworldly' thing once 'in the zone'...
 
J.A.W. said:
What have you gleaned about the Ki 43's armour layout?
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The (later model) Ki-43-II had 12mm plate armor behind the pilot seat, another 12mm plate behind the pilots head rest mounted at a 45 degree angle, and protected fuel tanks. They started manufacturing them with this about halfway through the Ki-43-II run, and then apparently installed the armor in the field on some of the older models. One intercepted JAAF intelligence report states that "after the first clashes between the Ki-43 and RAF Spitfires in Burma mentions that its pilots were pleased with the armour and fuel tank protection in the Type 1 Hayabusa and that one aircraft had returned safely after receiving 39 hits." Some more on this here.

J.A.W. said:
Part of what the Spitfire VIII pilot was saying referred to the .303" bullets
being visually deflected away from Me 109s at highly oblique angles - which is a function of the dural armour-plates set to do so.
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The armor on Bf 109s, and most WW2 fighters, would work best when being hit directly from behind. Fw 190s also had armor on the wing roots, nose, and some other places, and were unusually strong. But no WW2 aircraft could withstand heavy machine gun bullets beyond a certain point, let alone cannon.


Well that does make it interesting that the British started putting US M2 Browning .50 caliber machine guns into so many Spitfires and other fighters later in the war, replacing the .303s.

The idea that Bf 109s or Fw 190s could survive a .50 cal fighter attack is utter nonsense. I believe that is a WW2 era trope that became popular in the postwar era, similar to a lot of American tropes about "kill ratios" and so on.

As I've pointed out in here before, it didn't take many 12.7mm rounds to blow the wing off, blow the tail stabilizers off, kill the pilot, cut the fuselage tail off, etc. etc. Which you can see in countless gun camera reels and can count in the thousands of Luftwaffe losses inflicted by P-51 and P-47 units all over NE Europe, at least hundreds from defensive gunners on heavy bombers, and hundreds by P-40s in the MTO.

Incidentally IJN and JAAF pilots were trained that most Allied aircraft were vulnerable to hits in the nose area, due to the radiator, and on British and some US planes, to the fuel tank in front of the cockpit. They aimed for the nose by preference.
 
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tyrodtom said:
What models of Hurricanes were sent to Asia?
The Hurricane Mk.IIB had 12 brownings, not 8, and over 3000 were built.
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I am well aware. You do see both IIb and IIa in some units in India.


Apparently longer than the IIcs with 60 rounds.
 
J.A.W. said:
Weren't later production (most of 'em, there too many, by 1/2!) Hurricanes 'universal wing' types, with .303' in 8, or 12, or 4 x 20mm?
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That's interesting, I didn't realize they had an official "universal wing" for Hurricanes. I had read that that they took a pair of 20mm cannon out in some places in the East in 1942, and the Russians did the same with them as well. I assume any other fiddling with guns could have been done by unit mechanics in the field.
 

You can definitely see ricochets of tracers, which is visible again in a lot of gun camera footage, especially when strafing ground targets.
 

Bullets will punch through the skin of the aircraft, hit the armor, and bounce off. Routinely! Same will happen when you hit the engine block of a car or other vehicle. Saw that quite often at the range when in the Army. They had a bunch of old trucks etc. out on the machine gun range.
 

Thanks that fills in some gaps
 

maybe a few others, Spitfire VIII and IX for sure, Spit V too was worth having even if it didn't give an edge over Nazi planes, it held it's own especially the later versions and LF version. P-40F as well, was very useful for five fighter groups with the USAAF in the MTO (and for the DAF in general) and played a fairly important role in the Solomons too with 18 FG.

J.A.W. said:
Edit; According to D.N. James, in his book 'Hawker An Aircraft Album' on page 73, late production Hurricanes did indeed have a
"...universal wing" & yes, they were sent to Burma.
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Well, I guess they can take a two pairs of guns out of a IIb and more or less turn into a IIa easily enough...
 
In general, armor helps, but is by no means decisive. You can look at loss rates between A6M2 and various USN and USMC fighters in 1942 and 1943 and see about equal rates of planes shot down and rates of pilot death when a plane was shot down (it was high). Including with fairly heavily protected aircraft such as F4U. Survival rate for a shoot down was a bit, (just guessing) maybe about 15-20% better on the Allied side. I think the main difference in attrition losses was that pilots and other aircrew who survived a shoot down and bailed out or ditched etc. were often (maybe 80% of the time, maybe more in some cases) rescued by Allied forces, whereas on the Japanese side that was much rarer. Maybe like 5-10% of the time. They just didn't allocate much assets to this, even though I think they did have some available. Some IJN and JAAF pilots didn't even carry parachutes at certain points, as kind of a macho thing. There are a few gruesome anecdotes about that. In this Oscar book he also mentions at least a half dozen cases where JAAF pilots in crippled Ki-43s chose a 'death plunge', sometimes at an Allied target, sometimes just into the jungle or the sea, rather than risk capture. They would announce it on the radio and then go down...

In general, certainly in China, Japanese aircrew probably could not expect a warm welcome from the local civilians, given the scale of atrocities of the IJA.

One of the merits of the 12.7mm machine gun by the way was that it, especially with AP bullets, could punch through lighter armor at pretty long range. Maybe not 12mm like in the late model Oscars but a lot of planes especially earlier in the war had 8-10mm armor. It did depend on the angle as well.

Tracers were considered problematic for two reasons, as 1) they often warned a pilot that they were being shot at. There are several cases in this Ki-43 book where pilots mention seeing tracers and immediately taking evasive action. The other 2) reason is that the tracer rounds sometimes followed a different trajectory than the non-tracer rounds. They did help with aiming of course, especially for aircraft with a lot of ammunition like many later war Allied fighters, so some pilots did use them. I gather they were particularly helpful in high deflection shooting.

The alternative was the light explosive or incendiary charge, which made a 'flash' when it hit. This was preferred by some pilots. It also had the virtuous effect that it would routinely ignite fuel or hydraulic fluid when this was exposed to the air by damage. This was the famous "API" round used by late war US aircraft.

One thing in the favor of the Hurricane is that it was one of those aircraft that seemed to often limp home with severe battle damage and manage to land or crash land anyway. You can see this in the records in both CBI and in the MTO. Same with the P-40. And to my surprise reading this Osprey book, quite a few Oscars did as well, though you see a large number with pilots just instantly killed, and I think this was mostly with the earlier non- or less armored types.
 
RCAFson said:
These aren't necessarily gaps as these are the only Hurricane-Ki43 combats for that date range.
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Well, the only ones that he mentions. The differences I saw in your list were where the Osprey book didn't show confirmations. I don't necessarily assume that Hiroshi Ichimura is inevitably wrong whenever he disagrees with Christopher Shores. I've confirmed a lot of the losses where Ichimura mentions individual pilot names, as he often does. In fact every one I checked.
 
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Another issue worth noting is that survival rates from shot down aircraft also depended on how easy it was to bail out. P-39s were heavily protected by armor etc., but getting out of a crippled one in flight was tricky due to the door access to the cockpit. I.e. in most fighter planes, they would push back the canopy, turn the plane upside down if possible, and kick out, to clear the tail stabilizers and rudder. In the P-39 you had to open the door and get out on the wing and slide out and under the horizontal stabilizer. Many pilots failed to clear it and were killed or injured when it hit them. They had a kind of similar problem with P-38s (with the big horizontal stabilizer) and some early P-51s. (due to cockpit access)
 

Plenty of destructive penetration and outright disintegration here in this reel:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3cpkQT4Njw&t=10s
Anyone catching fire from six fifties was having a bad day at the office, indeed.
 
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