Quote:What ended up happening with this fighter was that the allies produced aircraft that were the polar opposite of it's flight envelope.
Sorry, I was out all day and am just getting back to this now.
What mainly happened to the Japs (
) was that they planned for the wrong war. What they planned was for a quick, decisive, strike which would force the US to negotiate for peace. Yamamoto warned that this would not be the case but no one listened. Instead, they found themselves in a war of attrition with a country that was larger and stronger and with a much superior industrial base. They had no effective counter to the submarine menace. Once we got our torpedoes straightened out it was all over for the merchant fleet. They had no long range plan for replacement pilot training. The operational losses sustained in the first months of the war caused the quality of their air arm to decline quickly. Shokaku and Zuikaku were kept out of the Midway campaign because their air groups were savaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea. The pilots who might have trained new pilots were dead because of this samurai mentality in which a warrior was supposed to fight - not teach. American pilot training OTOH was a sterling example of how to do it in a long war. And, as has probably been mentioned above, the Hellcats and Corsairs were far sturdier designs than anything the Japs had.Decent designs which Japan came up with later in the war were hampered by material shortages and could not be deployed in sufficient numbers to counter the growing US air arm, carrier based and land based. Again, even when those planes were available they were flown by pilots with little actual flight training time under their belts. To top it all off, the US had begun to use the concept of radar vectoring to intercept Jap planes and efficiently direct fighters to them.
Japan's failure was a top to bottom failing. They never had a chance no matter how much individual bravery individual sailors/soldiers/airmen showed.
