This is the WW2 Tales video Japanese Pilots Laughed At The F6F Hellcat, Until It Swept Their Zeros From The Sky
Captain David McCambell, the Navy's ace of aces with 34 victories, stated simply [at a 1962 symposium], "The Hellcat won the Pacific Air War. Period. It destroyed Japanese aviation and made our victory inevitable."
Commander Saburo Sakai responded, "The Zero was a superior fighter. The Hellcat was a superior weapon system. We never understood the difference until too late. We brought swords to a gunfight and wondered why we lost."
The video is 33 minutes long. I cannot embed it here, because of rules of the video's creator.
I seem to have fallen back into my study of World War II. This started several years back, before the lockdowns, when I stumbled on the book Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler’s Defeat. See this link. It really started a bit before that, with some other info on the Special Operations Executive, but this book got me to started in a big way to study aspects of the War in Europe that I had not studied in school. That led me to study the war of Soviet Union versus Germany. The video linked above has shown me that I know less about the war in the Pacific, outside of some of the highlights studied in school.
Anyway, it seems to have started up again triggered, mostly, by the Fat Electrician and his treatment of history. His videos are great, you should take a look. You might learn something. (It will only hurt for a minute.)
The image above is from U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation by way of Wikimedia. Click the image for more information.
The Voight F4U Corsair (whistling death) and the Grumman Hellcat won the pacific war. When the Zeros were up against the Grumman wildcat, they went into a vertical climb, and the Wildcat was under-engined to keep up. It eventually stalled, and the Zero would then drop down and take it out. When the Hellcats first appeared, the zeros pulled the same tactic, but were shocked when the Hellcats were gaining on them in the vertical climbs. Also, the Zeros had no armor so a machine gun burst would take them out. The Hellcats were heavily armored with self-sealing fuel tanks. It was a no contest situation. The Marianas Turkey shoot was the most crippling battle for Japan.
ReplyDeleteThe F6F could climb with the zero, but couldn't turn with it. So they didn't dogfight. Of course it helped that the zeros were outnumbered by a lot.
DeleteI think the real point is that statement was made by Saburo Sakai, probably the most famous Japanese pilot of WWII. He wasn't going to say "the zero sucked like a Hoover"
DeleteThe Hellcat couldn't turn with the Zero at low speeds (what had been considered "dogfighting speed") or maintain as steep a climb, but pilots were warned to keep their airspeed up while in combat. The Hellcat was very maneuverable at higher speed, was well armed, and carried a lot of ammunition. It was forgiving to fly (designed for "250-hour ensigns" I think was the phrase), it could survive a good bit of battle damage, and it was easy to maintain. Finally, it was apparently the cheapest, by a good margin, of the top US fighter planes. Someone called it "the Goldilocks fighter: just right", certainly for the carrier war in the Pacific. Sakai (whose book I have read) summed it up pretty well there. The Zero in its day, 1941-1942, had been the pre-eminent carrier fighter, but it had little room for improvement. Thanks for letting me spout off.
ReplyDeleteThe reason that the F6F, F4U and the F8F were designed was to specifically kill Japanese Zeros (of which the US got their hands on one mostly undamaged and easy to return to flight during the Aleutians Campaign.) They tested Zeros and other models of Japanese aircraft and said, "Hey, looky here, we can upengine with the R-2800 (same engine on the P-47)(and, yes, all three Navy fighters were designed around said same engine) and overpower everything that Japan can build now and in the foreseeable future.
ReplyDeleteAll 4 aircraft listed in the above paragraph were all very fast, very strong and very powerful fighters and all did well on the air race circuits after the war.
Sakai had a point. Even in 1945, a Zero flown by a master pilot could outfly and outfight the Hellcat. Or any other Allied fighter airplane. On the other hand, the Hellcat was faster, better armed, and more able to take battle damage than the Zero. Thanks to flights tests using a captured Zero, American pilots knew that the Zero's performance suffered at high speeds, and adjusted their tactics accordingly. And by the time the Hellcat made its debut in mid-1943, most of the master-class Zero pilots were dead, killed in the relentless fighting in the South and Southwest Pacific.
ReplyDelete