You mentioned a lot of other attributes previously, but in the quoted statement you forgot about nearly everything - radio for instance.

Thanks but no thanks on the baked beans. Will be impossible to get through customs.

Hi guys, I just survived a Jap air raid. They launched so many fighter and bombers at us. I had to bail after shot down 1 Zero and 2 Torpedo bombers.

I tried the energy tactics you guys told me, that Zero was bough down like that. However, during that charge, I didn't slow down my speed and did NOT bank hard, one of the Zero still manage to catch me after I shot down that one. Which I had no choice but to started heavy maneuver. I got away because 2 of friendly fighter came to save me, but I still got cornered by 3 Zero in the end and they shot my instruments and roll control all to hell. So I had to bail. Also since we are being raided, they had altitude advantage since the beginning, and they have been using this tactic on me. :(

I just wonder, why DIDN"T they use P-40s?? P-40 had way better maneuverability and better speed as well. And F4F's gun fire like a shotgun. I went so close and aim at Zero for like 3 seconds straight and I could see only few shots hit it. If it was a P-40, I could have bought down 2 Bf-109 already (which has better armor than Zero). But I can't shot down Zero because this gun fires like a shotgun. The bullet trajectory spread so large.

When I was piloting MiG-3, I can notice there is a difference in maneuver and acceleration if I only give MiG-3 70% (or less) fuel. But I have only given my F4F 30% fuel and I can't feel any differences.

Anyway, but it is fun. I have uploaded that mission so everyone can have a try and enjoy the sea battle.

Also to everyone who have been helping me so far: Thanks guys and anymore suggestions? :)

If you don't feel comfortable with the guns of your F4F, you could try to change the gun convergence. Experiment a little and find out what works the best for you.

You said that you were very close to the Zero. In that case the gun convergence was too far I think. The bullets don't come to one point before they hit the Zero, so they spread on the plane. But don't set your convergence too close or shooting from a distance becomes useless. And with wing mounted guns convergence is always an issue. Shooting with a Bf 109 is a lot easier ;)

Arguably, in terms of victories scored, the top Japanese aces were superior to the top American aces. OTOH, in terms of kill ratios after the first 6-12 months of the war the U.S. mopped the floor with the Japanese in terms of kill ratios.

Your posts - not just the one above - point out some extremely important difference between IJN and IJAAF and American pilots. The Americans had lots of little, intangible differences which came from, essentially, being American. And, I DON'T say that in a jingoistic sense - it's little things like greater population, better diet, more robust manufacturing base and higher levels of personal initiative which was based as much on American culture as U.S. military training.

Additionally, I think that one of the huge things that help destroy Japanese air power is that most Japanese pilots were enlisted men, and ALL Japanese pilots were treated as being fundamentally expendable by their high command. That was reflected in everything from airplane design to quality of survival equipment. Saburo Sakai mentions this in his memoir.

To be fair, this is because the Japanese were increasingly isolated and had progressively less ability to train due to the changing fortunes of war.

What might have been a factor is that the Japanese had a very authoritarian culture before and during WW2. Even today, in situations where national culture prevents subordinates from pointing out their errors of their superiors, tragedy can ensue. For example, until accident investigators figured this out, Korean airliner pilots had higher levels of accidents. This is because in Korean culture the command pilot is God and the copilot's job is to sit down, shut up and do as he is told.

Again, that's not meant to be any sort of endorsement of the US of A, or any sort of condemnation of any other culture, it's just different. (Also, note that frighteningly authoritarian regimes can encourage tactical innovation in the military. The 3rd Reich, which is the poster child for "evil authoritarian regime" trained its officers to improvise in tactical situations.)

Yeah, but the Luftwaffe was a relatively new establishment with many actual combat pilots in high ranks and having influence on decisions. Göring, Udet, Galland, just to name a few. And with Hitler being more interested in tactical details than in the strategic big picture. The Luftwaffe was more perceptible to the experiences and inventions of individual pilots than the RAF or the IJN. This has more to do with the special sociologic composition of the Luftwaffe than with the authoritarian nature of the Nazi state.

By the time the Corsair arrived, the Japanese didn't have many well trained pilots left. So was it -the plane- that made all the difference?

I saw a Bad-History Channel program on Japanese Secret Weapon Planes that stated that Japan had 100's of jet fighters at the end of the war, ready to take off and wipe the US planes from the sky. Yup. All there to just wipe the US out, lucky thing the war ended before the -next- Tuesday.

I wondered where they'd get pilots able to fly the things let alone fight in them. But in the Plane vs Plane mentality you just compare technical aspects to know the Winner, and maybe numbers manufactured. So whew did the US ever duck losing WWII to the Japanese with allllllll those jets!

I don't think it is a issue of convergence though. It is way easier if you are on a P-40E

I think that if you pursue the historical record of US losses at a given time and place versus Japanese claims, you will find that the IJN and IJAAF fighter pilots overclaimed much, much more than US or Allied pilots at any given point during the war. All of the Japanese claims are taken at the claimant's word, because there was no formal claims process in the Japanese system comparable to the Allied or even German systems. I think you'll find that at Coral Sea and afterwards, US and Allied losses never remotely matched Japanese claims, and that as the Allied air forces gained experience, their claims ever more closely matched recorded Japanese losses.

This was partly due to the fact that Japanese High Command never developed an intelligence function most other air forces did; most other countries' post-mission procedures included a pilot and or aircrew interview with the intelligence officer (IO)even before making a written report. This squadron or wing IO would then try to corroborate claims, point out conflicts and inconsistencies & then try to clear them up as much as possible before submitting a report listing losses taken and damages inflicted upon the enemy, including any unusual observations, etc. This report was used to develop a picture of what was going on in the air war, not just to keep track of pilots' scores. However, the result was that those pilots who were questioned and crosschecked quickly learned to be better observers and recognize the difference between what could be claimed and what could be treated like hyperbole (and nobody can hyperbolate like an American fighter pilots).

All the Japanese fighter pilots got was positive feedback; their commanders received their optimistic claims enthusiastically, and then acted upon the misconceptions that they gave rise to. Right up to the end of the war, Japanese Admirals and Generals would assume that enemy planes were destroyed, ships sunk and bases wiped from the face of the earth that still existed and threatened their own shrinking supply of aircraft, ships and bases.

Now, about the officer/enlisted distinction, I'm not sure that I can accept that one. Japanese culture was very taken up with the 'noble sacrifice' mentality; captains went down with their ships, generals and admirals died at their posts when the island they were defending was invaded, pilots repeatedly made suicidal decisions like the torpedo squadron commander at Midway who, after locating the US carriers on a recon, met his strike group in the air on the way back and turned around to lead them to the carriers (even though he knew that his position message had gotten through and his aircraft would not have enough fuel to get him back to his carrier after the strike).

The Japanese did not have the sort of mindset that allowed them to say that any one person short of the Emperor was too valuable an asset a waste on a whim, so they lost a great many skilled and specially trained men early in the war that they didn't have to, and went on to sacrifice literally millions right up to the last day of the war. Officers, enlisted, pilots, sailors, soldiers or marines, it didn't matter; you did what you were told to do, you went where you were sent and for heaven's sake, you never even considered questioning higher authority.

If MacArthur had been Japanese, he'd have either stayed on Corrigedor and died fighting to the last man, or he would have returned to Japan only so he could commit hari-kiri on the steps of the Imperial Palace to apologize for his failure. No way would he have been allowed to escape certain defeat and capture/death and then continue on in a command position--it would have been unthinkable and more importantly, unacceptable.

cheers

horseback

Your question about why the Navy and Marines didn't use P-40s has a very simple answer: it was an ARMY plane (never mind that for the first 18 months of the war, there just weren't enough of them to go around). In addition, the P-40 lacked the higher altitude performance that the F4F had due to its supercharged engine; the Allison was a very good engine up to around 4000m or so, but it lost a lot of what we cowboys like to refer to as 'oomph' above those heights, where the Wildcat had the same marginal performance right up to about 9000m. The Zero at those altitudes still had better performance, but the gap was not nearly as great.

This was extremely important at Guadalcanal, where airborne sneak attacks by either side were hard to achieve, because both sides had observers stationed on the islands between the major Japanese bases around Rabaul and the American held islands to the south and east some 500 (about 800km) miles away. When warned of an incoming strike the Marine and Navy Wildcats would take an hour to get up to altitude (most fuel efficient climb, I suspect) to be ready for the Japanese raiders, and there were still occasions that the Japanese came in higher than the Americans.

In real life, the Wildcat was considered more maneuverable than the Warhawk, and a better gun platform because the pilot's view was not obstructed by the nose and the carburetor intake; this allowed for easier deflection shooting, and US naval aviators were heavily trained in high-deflection tactics. They would have hated P-40s, never mind the better top speed.

cheers

horseback

When the Corsair arrived in the South Pacific, the pilots that they faced were some of the best Japan had to offer. In Fact, one of the first major F4U opps became known as the 'St Valentine's day Massacre' when several F4Us, P40s, and a P38 were shot out of the sky by Japanese fighters. The book 'Fire in the Sky: Air War in the South Pacific' illustrates vividly the differences between American and Japanese doctrine, and the destruction of the Japanese air arm in the skies over the South Pacific. The attrition suffered in the SoPac Japan never fully recovered from. The drain of skilled pilots paid dividends during the later battles in the central pacific. In all honesty, it was aircraft like the F4F, P40, and land based F4Us that faced the last of Japan's skilled aviators, and sent them down in flames.