Quote:
Originally Posted by secretone
from my reading, the Japanese were less team players...
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Indeed. Teamwork had little place in their cultural ethos of the Samurai, at least as far as fighter pilots went. The Japanese air services clung to an outdated tactical dicta, that of one on one aerial combat. And quite honestly, in the early stages of the war, they had the best trained pilots in the world in the art of dogfighting. The Army and Navy flight schools washed out many, many good pilots to crew positions, that would have been aces in any other air force.
This of course came back to bite them hard as they were unable to quickly replace ever growing losses from 1943 onwards. New Guinea in particular became a meat grinder for Imperial Japanese Army Air Corps pilots, as the Allies better understood how to use their faster, more heavily built aircraft against the Japanese. There is an amazing statistic the book "Fire in The Sky", the Japanese army lost 350 veteran pilots that had over 500 combat hours in New Guinea. This gutted their base of experienced pilots and they never fully recovered.