dgaad
Posts: 864
Joined: 7/25/2001
From: Hockeytown
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Nikademus
[B]
A fair accessment. My only correction would be to assert that the Zero's superiority was not a "myth" but a case sensitive situation which could be negated by the Intel level, experience, equipment and overall opening situation of the enemy side it was fighting. [/B][/QUOTE]
Wow. I may have succeeded in finding commonality. It was not a "myth" in the classic meaning of that word. I will assert that given an equal, high level of training, evenly matched pilots flying, say, a P40 versus a Zero, the P40 would probably prevail due to slightly better energy characteristics which give the craft the ability to determine the flow of the air engagement. You can't get into a dogfight with a plane that flys 10-15mph faster than you, unless the other guy is just dumb.
However, see my below comment, Nik.
[QUOTE]Originally posted by mdiehl
[B]"Even mdiehl admits, obliquely, that for about a 3 month period (Jan-March 42) the kill ratios were very favorable to the Japanese."
Indeed, I suspect they were. I'm digging for hard numbers, and having a difficult time coming up with an authoritative source.
The only reason why I'm digging is that at one time Nik and I would have agreed about the general superiority of the Zeke vs P40 or F4F and the general superiority of Japanese exp/training. As I kept reading, I kept finding instances in the early war that bucked the received wisdom, leading me into Lundstrom's research.
Somewhere along the line I came to the following question. If the A6M was superior and Japanese pilots were superior, how is it that US navy pilots managed to consistently shoot down as many or more Zekes than they lost in F4Fs? This seems to have been true starting in February 1942 (Lundstom: The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign, page 4, notes the loss of 16 Zekes in direct confrontations with Wildcats, with the loss of 10 F4Fs, in the interval IIRC 1 February through 1 June 1942).
So now I'm trying to figure out just how badly the various Allied *army* air forces in the Burma/Malaya/PI/Indonesia/Darwin and Port Moresby areas fared, and what the specific cirsumstances were. How many a/c lost in combat with Japanese fighters and of what type, rather than to ground fire, operationally, absence of parts, voluntarily destroyed, etc. And what numbers of a/c were involved? In which engagements was tactical surprise a factor? Was Allied radar present and operational at the time of an engagement?
Also, how does one model the learning curve effect? It seems to me to have spread like a virus. Much faster than the EXP gain rates modeled by GGPW, and possibly much faster than the rates posited by UV. Clearly, a pilot in, say, October 1942, need not have actually flown an engagement against an Oscar or Zeke to have heard and taken to heart the general admonition to keep one's airspeed up. [/B][/QUOTE]
You are diving at and going after exactly what is needed in this entire discussion : objectivity and rationality.
I think you are on the right track when you talk about what exactly was the level of knowledge of the corps US fighter pilots. What did they know, and when did they know it? I think you are on the right track when you are looking at the problem from the perspective that its entirely possible that the correct tactics might have been known even before December 7th, but that they might not have gotton out to all the pilots. The kind of things we know about in the present day with respect to fighter training and the huge effort the US government puts forth to make sure pilots know everything they need to know as soon as they possibly can, regardless of whether we are "at war" or in a hostile situation somewhere, was NOT the kind of situation we had in the year before the war. Training was done, but I don't think you can say with absolute certainty that EVERY pilot knew that energy attacks (or whatever was effective for their situation) were the way to go. Standardised requirements and methods, along with the necessary support, for extensive, excellent fighter pilot training programs wasn't really in place until about mid-1942.
So, its quite possible that entire squadrons of US pilots had had no formalised instruction on the efficacy of energy attacks against the Zero, and may not have even heard of the Thach Weave. Even if they had had such instruction, actually using this type of attack takes a tremendous amount of discipline, especially given the mentality of young fighter pilots.
And, given that as well, it is at least possible from an objective viewpoint that generally speaking the outcomes for Zero encounters were largely favorable until the training and flow of information gaps were rectified.
However, I also agree mdiehl that we are to some extent dealing with popular conceptions that insidiously seep into even organized thinkers, popular conceptions like the bushido / samurai Zero pilot who could with his "legendary" Zero, shoot down a bunch of Dakotas painted to look something like a fighter because the movie budget couldn't afford a real F4F. So, its also quite possible that there were a number of squadrons, even early in the war, that would have been a match for the Zero, and this in fact does fly in the face of more popular conceptions of that period of history.
Last point : keep in mind that unless most of the pilots were trained in and disciplined enough to use only energy attacks, a furball could well result in a favorable kill ratio for the Zero. My guess is that it wasn't until mid-to-late 1942 when we could say with a degree of certainty this was the case for a US fighter squadron.
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