Vought fighter/Mitsubishi Zero

[Jjr]

In a very interresting book about building th Australian aircraft industry, Aircraft Pioneer -Lawrence James Wackett, he mentioned some interesting information concerning the Vought fighter and the Zero.
Page 142/143: I realized, however, what a superb offer had been made by the Vought Company and intended to pursue the matter with vigour when I reached Australia.
On the way back I again called at East Hartford and inquired if the offer of the fighter still stood. I was informed that aince I had not accepted it they had offered the fighter to some visiting Japanese from the Mitsubishi Company, who had readily agreed to the deal. I said nothing more at the time, but a few years later when Japan attacked New Guinea and Zero fighters appeared in numbers, shooting down our aircraft, one of these Zeros was brought down by ground fire and was recovered and sent to Melbourne in a crashed condition for technical examination. When I examined it I was amazed to find that it appeared to resemble, in detail, something I had seen before. Suddenly I remembered. The Zero was almost an exact copy of the Vought fighter.
Etc.
Very interresting detail, who can tell me more about the design history of the Zero, was it influenced by the Vought fighter?

 

[TomS]

It's basically a myth with a heavy dose of racism, that the Japanese could never have designed a top notch plane on their own so must have had US (or German or Italian) help.

The Japanese did buy the single Vought V-143 in 1937 but it was already inferior to existing Japanese types. It seems like the only thing they copied was the retractable landing gear.

Myth of the Zero

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.

www.historynet.com

Vought V-141 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Justo Miranda]

Some info here

 

[Justo Miranda]

post-2

 

[Apteryx]

The early versions of the Zero, models 11 and 21, featured an engine cowling very similar to that fitted to the V-143. The plane that most closely resembles Vought's, however, is the Nakajima Ki-43. The distinctive wing planform is almost the same on both ships, and I think the landing gear setup is also very similar.

A little-noted irony: the Zero's eventual nemesis was the V-143's descendant, the Vought F4U Corsair.

 

[taildragger]

It's basically a myth with a heavy dose of racism, that the Japanese could never have designed a top notch plane on their own so must have had US (or German or Italian) help.

The Japanese did buy the single Vought V-143 in 1937 but it was already inferior to existing Japanese types. It seems like the only thing they copied was the retractable landing gear.

Myth of the Zero

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.

www.historynet.com

Vought V-141 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Oh, come on. Japan was a relatively recently industrialized nation that was behind the US and Europe in most areas of science and technology. Her creation of what seemed, by some measures, to be a world-beating fighter was surprising for reasons that had nothing to do with race. Sure, their were lots of racist attitudes towards the Japanese (and they were reciprocated) but doubts that the Zero was of purely Japanese origin didn't depend on them. The fact is that the technologies behind the Zero (radial engine. stressed skin, etc.) were relatively recently imported from the West and surprise at their their rapid distillation into the Zero is understandable.

 

[Justo Miranda]

The Allies were putting Japan in an untenable position that would force oil-starvated Japan to seize the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies.

For this purpose, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) should neutralize the powerful Singapore British defences and the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) should make landings in the Philippines, defended by the Americans. The war would be inevitable and the Allies knew it, but they did not expect the attack to be successful and were surprised when 17 Mitsubishi G4M bombers only, from the IJN Genzan Kokutai, managed to sink two of the most modern British battlecruisers in a few minutes.

Little afterwards, eighty-seven Nakajima Ki.27b and fifty-nine Nakajima Ki.43-Ia, from the IJA, destroyed the hundred-and-fourteen Brewster Buffalo and fifty-one Hawker Hurricane that defended Malaya, pushing back the British to Sumatra and Burma initially and then up to Ceylon and Australia. The Mitsubishi A6M2 Zero-Sen wrought havoc in Pearl Harbour, Philippines, Java and Ceylon by annihilating most of the fighters P-35, P-36, P-40, Hurricane Mk.II, Curtiss CW.21B and Fairey Fulmar that opposed them.

The exceptional dog fighting capabilities of the Japanese fighters and the ferocity and experience of their pilots had been virtually ignored by the Allied intelligence officers ... how could this happen?

The Nakajima Ki.27 had been operating in China since March 1938 and several units were captured and tested by Chinese and Soviets. Its performances were known in the West, but the archaic aspect of its airframe, with fixed undercarriage (inspired by that of the Northtrop XFT of 1934), made the Allies think that it was a design technologically surpassed.

Actually, under the protection of the six-hundred Ki.27 fighters, the IJA conquered 90 per cent of the territories occupied during the World War Two. The Ki.27 was not examined by experts of the Allies until the capture of one from the 77th Sentai in Burma, in April 1942.

The Zero was also unknown to the Allies. In the spring of 1941, the Chinese succeeded in shooting down an A6M2 over Chengdu. They managed to assemble very accurate data sheet and three-view drawings were given to the U.S. Navy Department and the U.S. War Department, but the experts did not consider the data credible and the report was ignored.

The Zero was designed to meet specification IJN 19 May 1937 that required a fighter capable of flying at more than 500 kph and with an exceptional range, to escort the bombers on the specific conditions of the war in China. Its construction was only made possible by adopting a retractable landing gear (based on that of the prototype Chance Vought V.143 acquired by the Japanese in 1937) and removing the armour and all the auxiliary equipment typical of a naval fighter, until the airplane weighted 25 per cent less than the Grumman F4F, even keeping its powerful armament. Nobody in the Western countries believed that a fighter with these characteristics could exist until the attacks to Pearl Harbour, Philippines and Java.

In July 1942, American experts could examine a Zero captured in Akutan Island and identified the weak points of its construction, an information that saved the lives of U.S. airmen and that was used to design the Grumman Hellcat. On the other hand, the Nakajima Ki.43 was completely unknown outside of Japan. The success of the Ki.27 had delayed the start of production until April 1941 with only 40 units having entered service in December. That was a complete surprise to the Allies, who at first mistook it for the Zero. The Japanese Army decided to reveal its existence in April 1942.

Equipped with butterfly combat flaps and weighting 33 per cent less than the P-40B, the Ki.43 was able to out-manoeuvre the Buffaloes, Hurricanes and Tomahawks. The first unit was captured at Chittagong, in the spring of 1942. Tested by the Australians, the Chinese and the Americans, it revealed some shortcomings in combat: lack of pilot armour and self-sealing fuel tanks.

The Allies soon developed 'hit and run' tactics that could be used successfully against it.

The Japanese R/T devices never worked air-to-air. The pilots used to uninstall them to save weight and communicated with each other by wing movements. The telescopic gunsight restricted the vision of the environment and many pilots of Ki.27 and Ki.43 were surprised by 'hit and run' attacks during the strafing of an airfield.

After initial successes, obtained by attacks with local numerical superiority against the 2nd line Allied Fighters, the Japanese sword blunted in Midway, Guadalcanal and New Guinea. The Allies reacted by designing and building thousands of Hellcats, Seafires, Corsairs, Mustangs, Thunderbolts and Lightings in record time, while the Japanese kept on manufacturing the same models than in 1941.

 

[Hood]

US intelligence on Japanese aircraft was not the greatest. They assigned codenames to German aircraft that never entered IJAAF or IJN use (He 111, Me 109, Ju 52) and even the A6M had at least 3 different codenames assigned to it at one point due to misidentifications, the Ki-48 was misidentified and given two codenames. Adbul, Adam, Ben, Harry, Ione and Omar were all assigned to speculative 'fakes'.

Partly this was due to being reliant on press information and second-hand information acquired in China, and partly due to technical ignorance - which is odd given the amount of input from British and German engineers in the Japanese industry since the 1920s, notwithstanding that Vought, Vultee and Seversky all did deals with Japan.
It was probably annoyance at those three companies for selling their wares to the likes of Japan and the USSR that was more behind the claims of copying, blaming them for giving the enemy the technical edge as a guilt-trip punishment for selling to the highest bidder.

The Japanese did copy aircraft (Lockheed 12, DC-2, Airspeed Envoy, He 66 among others) but generally adding their own improvements along the way and production of those copies were never large scale (excepting the Model 12 and DC-2). The A6M was finely honed to its task for light weight to extend range to the maximum. So the truth as ever is always a blur. If I remember correctly it was an Australian who had worked with Heinkel that gave Aichi the elliptical wing data for the D3A?

 

[TomS]

It's basically a myth with a heavy dose of racism, that the Japanese could never have designed a top notch plane on their own so must have had US (or German or Italian) help.

The Japanese did buy the single Vought V-143 in 1937 but it was already inferior to existing Japanese types. It seems like the only thing they copied was the retractable landing gear.

Myth of the Zero

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.

www.historynet.com

Vought V-141 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Oh, come on. Japan was a relatively recently industrialized nation that was behind the US and Europe in most areas of science and technology. Her creation of what seemed, by some measures, to be a world-beating fighter was surprising for reasons that had nothing to do with race. Sure, their were lots of racist attitudes towards the Japanese (and they were reciprocated) but doubts that the Zero was of purely Japanese origin didn't depend on them. The fact is that the technologies behind the Zero (radial engine. stressed skin, etc.) were relatively recently imported from the West and surprise at their their rapid distillation into the Zero is understandable.

The US discounted Japanese technical skill on so many fronts, for so long, even after ample evidence that they really were that good. I find it hard to believe that racism wasn't a major factor in that. You see it even in some of the language used in reports.

 

[Apteryx]

If you look through American popular culture of the time, the racism is stark and pervasive, even in things like Time and Life magazine. "Mongoloid" races were treated as not quite human. I believe the US suffered substantially from negative assumptions of Japanese racial inferiority, as did the British. Even after the war, nonsense persisted in the popular imagination about Japanese aircraft being made from bamboo and rice paper, and Japanese pilots being nearsighted.

 

[cluttonfred]

The great Japanese Aircraft of the Pacific War by the late René J. Francillon provides excellent insight into the history and development of Imperial Japanese combat aircraft. Japan was hampered by its limited industrial base in manufacturing, raw materials, and quality fuels but its designers had made enormous strides in short periods of time. Yes, they purchased and licensed foreign designs and brought in foreign designers like Richard Vogt (later of Blohm & Voss) to learn the latest techniques. They then applied what they learned to their own original designs that turned out to be quite a shock to the Western Allies, whose racism and intelligence failures led them to conclude that the Japanese had copied Western designs.

I'll never understand why the IJN stuck with the Zero for so long when it was clearly outclassed by 1943 or so and Japanese industry had shown it could build much better aircraft. I guess the early victories and dogfighting culture led to over-reliance on a design long past its prime. A Grumman Hellcat had almost twice the horsepower! Compare a Hellcat to an IJA aircraft of the same period, however, like the Nakajima Ki-84 Hayate (Gale) and the Japanese aircraft is absolutely on par with the Western competition. These specs are from Wikipedia, the Ki-84 numbers from U.S. tests of a captured example, the Grumman numbers from Jane's.

Ki-84-Ia
Empty weight: 2,660 kg (5,864 lb)
Gross weight: 3,601.5 kg (7,940 lb)
Max takeoff weight: 4,170 kg (9,193 lb)
Powerplant: 1 × Nakajima Ha-45-23 Homare 1,522 kW (2,041 hp)
Maximum speed: 682 km/h (424 mph, 368 kn) at 7,000 m
Range: 2,168 km (1,347 mi, 1,171 nmi)
Service ceiling: 11,826 m (38,799 ft)
Rate of climb: 21.84 m/s (4,299 ft/min) at sea level 18.29 m/s (3,600 ft/min) at 3,050 m (10,007 ft)
Wing loading: 171.47 kg/m2 (35.12 lb/sq ft)
2× 12.7 mm Ho-103 machine guns in nose, 350 rounds/gun
2× 20 mm Ho-5 cannon in wings, 150 shells/cannon

F6F-5 Hellcat
Gross weight: 12,598 lb (5,714 kg)
Max takeoff weight: 15,415 lb (6,992 kg)
Powerplant: 1 × Pratt & Whitney R-2800-10W Double Wasp 2,200 hp (1,600 kW)
Maximum speed: 391 mph (629 km/h, 340 kn)
Combat range: 945 mi (1,521 km, 821 nmi)
Ferry range: 1,530 mi (2,460 km, 1,330 nmi)
Service ceiling: 37,300 ft (11,400 m)
Rate of climb: 2,600 ft/min (13 m/s)
Time to altitude: 20,000 ft (6,096 m) in 7 minutes 42 seconds
Wing loading: 37.7 lb/sq ft (184 kg/m2)
6 × 0.50 in (12.7 mm) M2 Browning machine guns, with 400 rounds per gun (All F6F-3, and most F6F-5)

 

[taildragger]

It's basically a myth with a heavy dose of racism, that the Japanese could never have designed a top notch plane on their own so must have had US (or German or Italian) help.

The Japanese did buy the single Vought V-143 in 1937 but it was already inferior to existing Japanese types. It seems like the only thing they copied was the retractable landing gear.

Myth of the Zero

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.

www.historynet.com

Vought V-141 - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Oh, come on. Japan was a relatively recently industrialized nation that was behind the US and Europe in most areas of science and technology. Her creation of what seemed, by some measures, to be a world-beating fighter was surprising for reasons that had nothing to do with race. Sure, their were lots of racist attitudes towards the Japanese (and they were reciprocated) but doubts that the Zero was of purely Japanese origin didn't depend on them. The fact is that the technologies behind the Zero (radial engine. stressed skin, etc.) were relatively recently imported from the West and surprise at their their rapid distillation into the Zero is understandable.

The US discounted Japanese technical skill on so many fronts, for so long, even after ample evidence that they really were that good. I find it hard to believe that racism wasn't a major factor in that. You see it even in some of the language used in reports.

If an opinion can be supported rationally, it seems to me that's how it should be characterized. Any widely held sensible opinion will also be held by knuckleheads. Citing racist views that were congruent with questioning the Zero's origins on technical grounds doesn't diminish those questions.

 

[Sundog]

IIRC, by the time the Japanese forces got around to placing the Frank and the George into service, they were having trouble building enough engines for them, due to limited resources. Also, I think it to took them a while to get the new engines up to producible standards. The other thing I think they suffered from was many different airframe and engine types trying to be developed simultaneously. That's what also hampered Italy. Granted, the U.S. did have many engines in development testing, which didn't work out. But for war time purposes, they focused mainly on the standard Allison inlines (1710?) and the P&W radials for war time efforts. The RR (To eventually become a Packard version) Merlin. Calum's book should answer many of those questions.

In fact, I think that was the issue they originally had with the development of the A7M, they couldn't decide which engine to use in it, which dragged out it's development.

 

[nuuumannn]

'll never understand why the IJN stuck with the Zero for so long when it was clearly outclassed by 1943 or so and Japanese industry had shown it could build much better aircraft.

It's a question that gets asked and attempted answering often. Delays in getting the intended replacement, the A7M into production for various reasons, prevarication within the IJN high command, resting on their laurels regarding the aircraft's abilities all contributed. The IJN leaned on the A7M and persisted as its replacement carrier fighter until an earthquake and subsequent bombing raids destroyed drawings and damaged the Mitsubishi factory late in the war. It is odd considering that specifications for land based naval interceptors were launched, fulfilled by the J2M and N1K2, but carrier based fighters were not so readily forthcoming. The IJN's entire strategy appeared to be knee-jerk - land based fighters were needed for its island campaigns as carriers had been lost in combat, yet the A7M was just around the corner, so we'll persist with the A6M until then...

The thing was that the Zero was, although outdated by 1944/1945, still a formidable fighter in the right hands, but it lacked performance compared to the later Allied fighters. US pilots were still cautioned about encountering the Zero though, advise was never to dog fight it at low speed.

Regarding the aircraft's design having been influenced by foreign designs, it was in as much as its predecessor the A5M's designers inherited foreign technologies and know how, but the A6M was a wholly indigenous design incorporating current advances in aeronautics and owed nothing to any existing foreign fighters, racers or such like, contrary to popular belief.

Although specifically referencing the A6M3 'Hamp', take a look at this description published in a US aviation magazine during the war for a technological review of the type. It really was an individual effort unlike any other fighter at the time.

Design Analysis of the Zeke 32 (Hamp - Mitsubishi A6M3)