The Zero’s excellent Nakajima-built Sakae engine was eventually upgraded by about 150 hp, but it never attained anything like the horsepower offered by the Pratt & Whitney R-2800, the P-38’s twin Allisons or the P-51’s Packard Merlin. The Zero was incrementally improved throughout the war, from the A6M2, the first model to take on American fighters, to the A6M8 (only two built), intended to attack B-29s. By the time they did get serious, raw materials were lacking and the country’s skilled airframe-and-engine workforce had fled the manufacturing centers, bombed out of their homes. It didn’t help that Japan, a small island nation with limited engineering and manufacturing manpower, spent its time dithering over the development of more than 90 major combat types as well as several dozen lesser models. Or perhaps they should have developed just one of them. Much like the German high command initially assumed the Me-109 would suffice for the duration of the war and that it didn’t need to engineer a successor, the Japanese waited too long to develop and produce the Shiden, Raiden and Reppu. Nor was the production of a Zero successor given high priority. was turning tens of thousands of college grads into pilots the great majority of Japanese pilots were the equivalent of our NCOs. Zero pilots were superbly trained, but only hundreds at a time, then a few thousand a year while the U.S.

So Japan had done little to prepare for a protracted conflict. to the negotiating table in order to establish an unfettered area of Japanese exploitation in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese had counted on a short, brutal war-not to annex America as an enormous sushi-loving colony, but to force the U.S. Nobody ever built a fighter that could outmaneuver it, and the fact that Grumman developed the F8F Bearcat as a Zero-beater-a task that it was just a bit too late to fulfill-shows that the Zero was never entirely disdained. Not that the Zero wasn’t still dangerous even in 1945, especially if an aviator was cocky enough to try to dogfight one of the few remaining experienced Zero pilots. The June 1944 Marianas Turkey Shoot is the most notorious example of such inequity. The Zero soldiered on until the end of the war, of course-many self-immolating as kamikazes-but only because the Japanese had nothing to replace it, and the Zero often was simply cannon fodder. Robert Hanson, shot down 20 Zeros in 17 days. In January 1944, a single Marine F4U pilot, 1st Lt. World War II fighters-P-38, F4U and F6F-arrived beginning in early 1943, the Zero was finished as an effective fighter. Not counting its earliest sucker-punch missions over China, when the best-trained fighter pilots in the world swatted down scores of ill-flown Polikarpov biplanes and open-cockpit monoplanes, the Zero reigned supreme in the Pacific War only from the day of the Pearl Harbor attack until American pilots learned tactics that allowed even pudgy F4F Wildcats to level the aerial playing field during the Guadalcanal campaign in the summer and fall of 1942. The oft-forgotten fact is that the Zero’s effective combat career was measured in months.

The truth-and how many times have you heard this?-lies somewhere in the middle. Or, if you believed a different set of legends, mysteries, racism and rumor, it was a flimsy, beer-can tinderbox that brazenly aped Western designs and was flown by short, bandy-legged Asians who wore Coke-bottle-bottom glasses and fled whenever the U.S. The Zero was said to have awesome performance, superb maneuverability and combat characteristics an order of magnitude ahead of anything else in the sky. Has there ever been a warplane as mythic as the Mitsubishi Zero? Legend, mystery, racism and rumor conflated to create an unbeatable fighter flown by samurai-tough pilots. Mitsubishi’s legendary A6M ran circles around opposing fighters early in World War II, but by 1945 its odds of surviving a dogfight were close to zero.

Air combat maneuvers japan