Was the Zero too good?

Japan's industrial base was, in 1940, much weaker than it became post-WW2, and far more dependent on imports of materials than either Italy or Germany, and, so, far more vulnerable to submarine warfare, possibly moreso than the UK, which could produce energy and at least some iron from domestic resources (I suspect the UK also had more arable land not used for farming or pasture: estates and golf courses could always be plowed up for agriculture or used as pasture).

One issue of their resource limits is that Japanese metallurgists had to develop steels that used copper as an alloying element as they couldn't get enough nickel.

A few pointers.
Japan didn't have an industrial revolution until 1870 so they went from zero to Zero in a relatively short space of time.
The Japanese also fought a war with the USSR in 1939 and lost. Battles of Khalkhyn Gol.
They having no luck with the Russians decided war against USA instead. Oddly if they invaded Siberia as the North Strike Group wanted in 1941 when the Germans invaded then the Soviets could have collapsed.
Battles of Khalkhyn Gol are forgotten but we owe a great debt to Zhukov.

To expand on my earlier comment, Japan knew they had limited resources, especially after they lost their raw materials and fuel imports from the U.S. - so time was of the essence and yet, they did not have a sense of urgency in their fighter, attack and bomber development until the war turned in the Allies' favor. Much like Germany's output, which peaked in 1944, Japan's aircraft manufacturing held a steady pace of production and new type development until the later stages of the war.
Had either Germany or Japan (or both) pushed for production and development levels in 1939, like they were in 1944, then the face of the war would have had a much different look.

GrauGeist said:

To expand on my earlier comment, Japan knew they had limited resources, especially after they lost their raw materials and fuel imports from the U.S. - so time was of the essence and yet, they did not have a sense of urgency in their fighter, attack and bomber development until the war turned in the Allies' favor. Much like Germany's output, which peaked in 1944, Japan's aircraft manufacturing held a steady pace of production and new type development until the later stages of the war.
Had either Germany or Japan (or both) pushed for production and development levels in 1939, like they were in 1944, then the face of the war would have had a much different look.

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Dave - Germany was in big economic problems already by 1938 due to fast re-armament program. Hence the grad towards Austria and Czechoslovakia, to steal the gold reserves. Asking from them to double the miitary spending at late 1930s would've meant the land grab already in 1937, with what consequences?

Let's say Germany had a shortage of copper in 1939.
How do you increase war production?
They had a shortage of copper from the production they had.

The Basket said:

Let's say Germany had a shortage of copper in 1939.
How do you increase war production?
They had a shortage of copper from the production they had.

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Invade their neighbors and steal whatever they can get their hands on, which is exactly what they did. Then, enslave those countries citizens or kill them and steal their property. Gee, they did that, too.

Guys, keep on track and leave the politics out of this

Let's take a look at some numbers, first of all. I'll use 1939 through 1945 to make a balanced comparison.

The total number of ALL aircraft produced by Germany:
1939 - 8,295
1940 - 10,862
1941 - 12,401
1942 - 15,409
1943 - 24,807
1944 - 40,593
1945 - 7,540
Total - 119,907

The total number of ALL aircraft produced by Japan:
1939 - 4,467
1940 - 4,768
1941 - 5,088
1942 - 8,861
1943 - 16,693
1944 - 28,180
1945 - 8,263
Total - 76,320

Now we have to consider the decision to go to war by Germany & Japan was not a surprise to anyone in their leadership and had been planned ahead of time. In the early years for both Japan and Germany, their aircraft factories only had a single shift and as had been mentioned before, there was not a sense of urgency until the war situation was dire.
The argument that either Government didn't have the financial base for large production doesn't work here, because if we look at the numbers, both country's production totals peaked while their respective counties were being bombed day & night, their armies were in chaos, their Navies almost non-existant and they had virtually no GDP at that point, unlike 5 years earlier.

After Pearl Harbor, the United States went into a "wartime footing", meaning that they went into a scramble to get their factories in motion and in many cases, their factories went 24 hours a day - from the start. So let's look at the U.S. production numbers from the same time period - allowing that 1942 through 1945 should be the focus of comparison.
1939 - 2,141
1940 - 6,068
1941 - 18,466
1942 - 46,907
1943 - 84,853
1944 - 96,270
1945 - 45,852
Total - 300,557

Now let's stop for a moment and look at the U.S. prewar aircraft totals for a moment. Keep in mind that the U.S. was coming out of the "Great Depression" and there wasn't any real funding for the Army or Navy (one of the reasons there wasn't more manpower at Pearl Harbor on 7 December, but that's for another discussion) AND yet, the U.S. was producing more aircraft during peacetime than Japan was for wartime (1939, 1940 & 1941). And the U.S. was mostly producing aircraft for export during those 3 years, too.

So again, I contend that the Japanese should have taken their war effort seriously and focused on heightened development and production and in addition, not have rested on their laurels with the A6M, and started working on it's replacement even as it was being produced for front-line use.

GrauGeist said:

So again, I contend that the Japanese should have taken their war effort seriously and focused on heightened development and production and in addition, not have rested on their laurels with the A6M, and started working on it's replacement even as it was being produced for front-line use.

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Are we not gazing through the retrospectroscope here? The flaw in your argument is that the Japanese leadership never envisaged a long attritional war. They drank their own Kool-Aid and believed that America, in particular, lacked the stomach for war and would simply roll over and play dead after Pearl Harbor. Consequently, there was no need for anything better than the aircraft production that Japan already had planned...at least in the minds of key leadership officials. We can now look back and see clearly how misguided it was to take such a position...but at the time, no doubt, it was entirely logical from the perspective of many Japanese.

lol...you know me, one of the few that use the foggy goggles of retro-vision!

They had already tangled with the Soviet Union and learned a hard lesson and were in the midst of conquest in Southeast Asia and the SWP.
Even if they had parlayed a peace with the U.S. (before or after Pearl Harbor), they would still need cutting edge technology.
Especially in light of the fact that they were also encroaching on European colonies.

Aircraft numbers are misleading.
If you build lots of single engine fighters then you are going to have a large number built. If you build lots of Ju-88 then you will have far fewer.
Your data shows that USA built more aircraft in 1944 than the whole of Japanese wartime production!
Both the Zero and Hayabusa first flew in 1939 and so 3 years behind the Spitfire and far inferior. So if you build lots of Japanese fighters in 1939 then you build Ki-27 and A5M which is hardly a good idea.

buffnut453 said:

Are we not gazing through the retrospectroscope here? The flaw in your argument is that the Japanese leadership never envisaged a long attritional war. They drank their own Kool-Aid and believed that America, in particular, lacked the stomach for war and would simply roll over and play dead after Pearl Harbor. Consequently, there was no need for anything better than the aircraft production that Japan already had planned...at least in the minds of key leadership officials. We can now look back and see clearly how misguided it was to take such a position...but at the time, no doubt, it was entirely logical from the perspective of many Japanese.

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(my bold)
Japanese were surely looking for ever-better A/C, even in the days of early 1942. Not just looking, there was plenty of designs in the pipeline - two new army fighters (even though the Ki-43 didn't replaced the Ki 27 completely yet), new naval dive bomber, torpedo bomber and land-based fighter, several twin-engined bombers, new types of floatplane recon/fighter A/C. The carrier-based fighter to suplant and then replace the Zero was one of rare categories where they dropped the ball with new developments.

tomo pauk said:

(my bold)
Japanese were surely looking for ever-better A/C, even in the days of early 1942. Not just looking, there was plenty of designs in the pipeline - two new army fighters (even though the Ki-43 didn't replaced the Ki 27 completely yet), new naval dive bomber, torpedo bomber and land-based fighter, several twin-engined bombers, new types of floatplane recon/fighter A/C. The carrier-based fighter to suplant and then replace the Zero was one of rare categories where they dropped the ball with new developments.

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True enough, Tomo, but the effort was highly dispersed, and hence diluted. Many of the follow-on aircraft, particularly the fighters, struggled to match expectations or operational needs. Frankly, one has to question the resources devoted to development of floatplanes. If your strategy is such that it dictates development of ever more capable floatplanes, then you probably have the wrong strategy (IMHO). A resource-strapped nation shouldn't be wasting precious design, development and testing resources on such niche capabilities when primary combat airframes are struggling to keep pace.

I do get the sense that Japanese leadership in the late 1930s was, to quote The Joker, "like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one, you know, I just do…things." Japan wanted an empire and wanted dominance in the western Pacific, but the leadership didn't really understand what to do with all the territory they gained nor, and here was the real strategic blunder, how to defend it. What looked like a great red wave covering the Pacific was, in reality, relatively small and isolated outposts that could never be mutually supporting, and hence could be defeated piecemeal. This all suggests a lack of thought, back in the late 1930s, about what to do if/when the initial offensives succeed. The only logical conclusion is that they never imagined that America would stand up to the might of Imperial Japan...and they marshalled their resources accordingly.

The Hi command had issued a requirement for a replacement for the Zero in 1940. It got sidelined for a while and then updated in 1942 and this lead to the A7M Reppu.

From Wiki
"
Towards the end of 1940, the Imperial Japanese Navy asked Mitsubishi to start design on a 16-Shi carrier-based fighter, which would be the successor to the carrier-based Zero. At that time, however, there were no viable high-output, compact engines to use for a new fighter. In addition, Jiro Horikoshi's team was preoccupied with addressing early production issues with the A6M2b as well as starting development on the A6M3 and the 14-Shi interceptor (which would later become the Mitsubishi J2M Raiden, a land-based interceptor built to counter high-altitude bombers). As a result, work on the Zero successor was halted in January 1941.

In April 1942, the development of the A6M3 and the 14-Shi interceptor was complete, and the Japanese Navy once again tasked Mitsubishi and Horikoshi's team with designing a new Zero successor to become the Navy Experimental 17-shi Ko (A) Type Carrier Fighter Reppu. In July 1942 the Navy issued specifications for the fighter: it had to fly faster than 345 kn (639 km/h; 397 mph) above 6,000 m (20,000 ft), climb to 6,000 m (20,000 ft) in less than 6 minutes, be armed with two 20 mm cannon and two 13 mm (0.51 in) machine guns, and retain the maneuverability of the A6M3."

Unfortunately for the Japanese the critical year of 1941 had been lost. However without the "viable high-output, compact engines" there wasn't going to be a lot of progress made. The next step/s above the Sakae engine (28 liters) was the Kinsei (32.3 liters) and then the jump to the Kasai (42) liters as used in the G4M bomber. However in 1941/42 this was a 1500hp engine in production form.

buffnut453 said:

True enough, Tomo, but the effort was highly dispersed, and hence diluted. Many of the follow-on aircraft, particularly the fighters, struggled to match expectations or operational needs. Frankly, one has to question the resources devoted to development of floatplanes. If your strategy is such that it dictates development of ever more capable floatplanes, then you probably have the wrong strategy (IMHO). A resource-strapped nation shouldn't be wasting precious design, development and testing resources on such niche capabilities when primary combat airframes are struggling to keep pace.

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Oh, I agree that Japanese made a good deal of self-inflicted wounds when it was about next-gen designs (not only in that area, of course). The dedicated floatplane fighter is a major point there - as a Navy, push for a next-gen fighter for carriers, then, if you have more fighters produced than it can fit on your carriers use them from land bases, and just after that make the floatplane fighter conversions is you have any fighters left. The IJN and IJA having each fighters and 2-engined bombers in desing - a major mistake, Japan is no rich powerhouse as it was USA or UK, and even those sometimes used the A/C initially designed for 'other' branch of military. Each service has their own machine guns/cannons, while each category of guns uses different cartridge?? Bombs and torpedoes from IJN can't fit on IJA A/C??

I do get the sense that Japanese leadership in the late 1930s was, to quote The Joker, "like a dog chasing cars, I wouldn't know what to do if I caught one, you know, I just do…things." Japan wanted an empire and wanted dominance in the western Pacific, but the leadership didn't really understand what to do with all the territory they gained nor, and here was the real strategic blunder, how to defend it. What looked like a great red wave covering the Pacific was, in reality, relatively small and isolated outposts that could never be mutually supporting, and hence could be defeated piecemeal. This all suggests a lack of thought, back in the late 1930s, about what to do if/when the initial offensives succeed. The only logical conclusion is that they never imagined that America would stand up to the might of Imperial Japan...and they marshalled their resources accordingly.

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Imperial Japan gambled, and asumed that West will do what Japanese military expected, while themselves being unable to sort out the quagmire they found themselves in China. Gamble backfired badly.

I doubt Japan gambled on war with USA.
They wanted it.
The IJN and IJA were 2 separate power blocks so didn't need or want to cooperate.
In my book Japan was 4 years behind Western powers with fighters.
They were even behind the Italians in fighters and I can think of no greater insult!

The Basket said:

I doubt Japan gambled on war with USA.
They wanted it.

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I disagree. Japan didn't WANT war with the US, but they felt they had to attack the US. Where they gambled was in the TYPE of war they expected to wage.

Japan wanted the oil resources of the Dutch East Indies in order to successfully prosecute their campaigns in China. That need for oil drove the necessity of attacking British Imperial territories in the region and, by extension, to US territories (ie the Philippines) that lay on the shipping route between the Gulf of Thailand and the Japanese homeland. The expansionist logic led Japan's leaders to the conclusion that war with the US was inevitable.

Japan could only afford a short, decisive war in which the US was soundly defeated, hence their preemptive actions to knock America out of the war right at the start. That certainly was a gamble, and it failed dismally.

For some reason, bother the Luftwaffe and the JAF did not upgrade their engines accordingly as the wa progressed.
One poster on another board said if the Luftwaffe had re-engineered the Fw-190A with the DB603 in early 1944 instead of using them on ME-410s, the Luftwaffe would been theoretically able to have equality with the P-51. Japan should have adapted the Nakajima N9KH (1900Hp) or at least a 1500HP engine by1943 to keep up with the F6F or F4U

tomo pauk said:

Oh, I agree that Japanese made a good deal of self-inflicted wounds when it was about next-gen designs (not only in that area, of course). The dedicated floatplane fighter is a major point there - as a Navy, push for a next-gen fighter for carriers, then, if you have more fighters produced than it can fit on your carriers use them from land bases, and just after that make the floatplane fighter conversions is you have any fighters left.

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Hello Tomo Pauk,
I believe you are forgetting one thing here. The Japanese didn't really have the ability to create land bases for their aircraft in a timely fashion as the US did. Look at the time spent on Henderson Field.
Until a land base is ready, the air support either comes from a carrier or sea planes / float planes.

The Basket said:

In my book Japan was 4 years behind Western powers with fighters.
They were even behind the Italians in fighters and I can think of no greater insult!

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Hello The Basket,
I would have to disagree with you on a couple points here.
First of all, the Italians never were able to produce a competent fighter with entirely domestic technology.
Their best fighters all used German engine designs.
The Japanese on the other hand produced a few competitive designs with their own technology such as the Ki 84, N1K2, and J2M.
As I see it, at the end of the war, all three of the designs I listed were in production and were competitive with then operational US fighters, so the gap between the Japanese and the West was not nearly 4 years.

Going back to the original subject:
I believe it wasn't so much the superiority of the A6M as the inferiority of opposition that the Japanese met in China that gave them the confidence in their own superiority. Meeting the Russians in China wasn't enough of a wake-up call for them.

I believe also that the Japanese diluted their design efforts and didn't have enough competent design teams to do everything they wanted. Their replacement for the A6M just didn't happen, but their replacements for other shipboard aircraft came along just fine. Those designs were quite competitive and arguably superior to the equivalent American designs.
They just didn't realise that without a superior fighter to escord, all the other stuff is basically just targets for the other side's superior fighters.

- Ivan.

Japan could build the domestically-designed Homare 1900 HP radial, but could not build those engines in the quantity necessary to be on the same level as the Pratt & Whitney R-2800, which powered the F4U, F6F, P-47, C-46, B-26, A-26 and more. Japan struggled to build the engines in the hundreds per month, building a total of less than 9,000 during the war, but the United States built 125,000 R-2800 engines, including almost 58,000 built by Ford Motor Company and 11,0000 by Nash.